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COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



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Portrait of Mallarme by Whistler 



COLOUR STUDIES 
IN PARIS 



BY 

ARTHUR SYMONS 

AUTHOR OP 

Pkys, Acting and Music," " Studies in Seven Arts,' 
" The Symbolist Movement in Literature," etc. 



ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS 
SIGNATURES AND RARE CARTOONS 



NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

68i Fifth Avenue 



1f ' 



Copyright, 1918 
By E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 



All rights reserved 



M 12IS18 

Printed in the Vnited States of America 



©CLA4977U9 



/•Vv* I" 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Paris • 3 

The Gingerbread Fair at Vincennes . . 5 

MONTMARTRE AND THE LaTIN QUARTER . . 25 

Paris and Ideas ....... 43 

The Poet oi- the Bats 55 

Songs of the Streets 67 

A Book of French Verses 77 

At the Ambassadors 89 

Yvette Guilbert 91 

La Melinite: Moulin-Rouge . . . . . 105 

Dancers and Dancing 107 

Leon Bloy: The Thankless Beggar , .121 

Victor Hugo and Words 131 

A Tragic Comedy 147 

P£trus Borel . 157 

V 



vi CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Notes on Paris and Paul Verlaine: 

The Absinthe-Drinker 189 

At the Cape Francois Premier . . .191 
The Man 197 

BONHEUR . 205 

Epigrammes 215 

Confessions 219 

Dedicaces 223 

Invecti\es 231 

A Prince of Court Painters . . . .239 

Odilon Redon 251 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 

Portrait of Mallarme by Wh'stler . Frontispiece 

Quartier Latin. lo A. m 26 

Quartier Latin. 5 p. m 30 

Quartier Latin. 2 A. m 36 

Le Rat Mort 38 

Invitation Card, Le Rat Mort .... 39 

Cartoon of Jean Moreas 44 

Facsimile of Letter from Montesquiou . . 56 

Aristide Bruant 68 

Newspaper, " Le Mirliton " 70 

Cartoon of Charles Cros 78 

Yvette Guilbert 96 

Poster. Folies-Bergere 108 

Victor Hugo as a Young Man . . . .132 
Facsimile of Letter from Victor^^^Hugo . .136 

Petrus Borel 162 

Facsimile of Verlaine's Signature . . . .198 
Cartoon of Arthur Rimbaud .... 202 

Paul Verlaine 206 

Facsimile of Letter from Mallarme . . . 225 
Facsimile of Note from Redon . . . .251 

Odilon Redon 254 

vii 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



PARIS 

My Paris is a land where twilight days 
Merge into violent nights of black and gold ; 
Where, it may be, the flower of dawn is cold : 
Ah, but the gold nights, and the scented ways ! 

Eyelids of women, little curls of hair, 
A little nose curved softly, like a shell, 
A red mouth like a wound, a mocking veil : 
Phantoms, before the dawn, how phantom- fair ! 

And every woman with beseeching eyes, 
Or with enticing eyes, or amorous, 
Offers herself, a rose, and craves of us 
A rose's place among our memories. 
1894 



THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT 
VINCENNES 



The tram rolls heavily through the sun- 
shine, on the way to Vincennes. The sun 
beats on one's head like the glow of a 
furnace ; we are in the second week of May, 
and the hour is between one and two in the 
afternoon. From the Place Voltaire, all 
along the dingy boulevard, there are signs of 
the fair; first, little stalls, with the refuse 
of ironmonger and pastry-cook, then little 
booths, then a few roundabouts, the wooden 
horses standing motionless. At the Place 
de la Nation we have reached the fair itself. 
Already the roundabouts swarm in gor- 
geous inactivity : shooting-galleries with lofty 

5 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



names — Tir Metropolitan, Tir de Lutece — 
lead on to the establishments of cochonnerie, 
the gingerbread pigs, which have given its 
name to the Foire au pain d'epice. From 
between the two pillars, each with its airy- 
statue, we can look right on, through lanes 
of stalls and alleys of dusty trees to the 
railway bridge which crosses the other end 
of the Cours de Vincennes, just before it 
subsides into the desolate Boulevard Soult 
and the impoverished grass of the ramparts. 
Hardly anyone passes : the fair, which is up 
late, sleeps till three. I saunter slowly along, 
watching the drowsy attitudes of the women 
behind their stalls, the men who lounge be- 
side their booths. Only the photographer 
is in activity, and as you pause a moment 
to note his collection of grimacing and 
lachrymose likenesses (probably very like), 
a framed horror is thrust into your hand, 
and a voice insinuates: Six pour un sou. 
Monsieur! 

6 



THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES 

To stroll through the fair just now is to 
have a sort of "Private View." The hour 
of disguises has not yet begun. The heavy- 
girl who, in an hour's time, will pose in rosy 
tights and cerulean tunic on those trestles 
yonder in front of the theatre, sits on the 
ladder-staircase of her "jivin wardo," her 
"living waggon," as the gipsies call it, dili- 
gently mending, with the help of scissors 
and thread, a piece of canvas which is soon 
to be a castle or a lake. A lion-tamer, in 
his shirt-sleeves is chatting with the pro- 
prietress of a collection of waxworks. A 
fairy queen is washing last week's tights in 
a great tub. And booths and theatres seem 
to lounge in the same deshabille. With their 
vacant platforms, their closed doors, their 
too visible masterpieces of coloured canvas, 
they stand, ugly and dusty, every crack and 
patch exposed by the pitiless downpour of 
the sunlight. Here is the show of Pezon, 
the old lion-tamer, who is now assisted by 

7 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

his son; opposite, his rival and constant 
neighbour, Bidel. The Grand Theatre 
Cocherie announces its grand f eerie in three 
acts and twenty tableaux. A concert in- 
ternational succeeds a very dismal-looking 
Temple de la GaietL Here is the Theatre 
Macketti; here the Grande Musee Vivant; 
here a Galerie artistique at one sou. 
Laurent, inimitable dompteur (pour la 
premiere fois a Paris) has for companion 
Juliano et ses fauves: Fosse aux Lions. 
There is a very large picture of a Soudanese 
giant — il est ici, le geant Soudanais; 2m 2o 
de hauteur — outside a very small tent; the 
giant, very black in the face, and very red 
as to his habiliments, holds a little black 
infant in the palm of his hand, and by his 
side, carefully avoiding (by a delicacy of 
the painter) a too direct inspection, stands 
a gendarme, who extends five fingers in a 
gesture of astonishment, somewhat put of 
keeping with the perfect placidity of his 

8 



THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES 

face. Theatres des Illusions flourish side 
by side with Musees artistiques, in which 
the latest explosive Anarchist, or Le double 
crime du boulevard du Temple is the 
"great attraction" of the moment. Highly- 
coloured and freely designed pictures of 
nymphs and naiads are accompanied by such 
seductive and ingenuous recommendations 
as this, which I copy textually. I cannot 
reproduce the emphasis of the lettering: 

Etoiles Animees. Filles de VAir. Nou- 
velle attraction par le professeur Julius. 
Pourquoi Mile. Isaure est-elle appelee 
Deesse des Eauxf Cest par sa grace et 
son pouvoir mysterieux de paraitre au 
milieu des Eaux limpides, devant tous les 
spectateurs qui deviendront ses Admira- 
teurs. En Plein Theatre la belle Isaure 
devienf Syrene et Nayade! char me par ses 
jeux sveltes et souples, apparait en Plein 
Mer, et presentee par le professeur Julius 
a chaque representation. Plusieurs pales 

9 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

imitateurs essay ent de copier la belle Isaure, 
mais le vrai Public, amateur du Vrais et 
du Beau, dira que la Copie ne vaut pas 
V original. And there is a Jardin mysterieux 
which represents an improbable harem, with 
an undesirable accompaniment of perform- 
ing reptiles. Before this tent I pause, but 
not for the sake of its announcements; in 
the doorway sits a beautiful young girl of 
about sixteen, a Jewess, with a face that 
Leonardo might have painted. A red frock 
reaches to her knees, her thin legs, in white 
tights, are crossed nonchalantly : in her black 
hair there is the sparkle of false diamonds, 
ranged in a tiara above the gracious contour 
of her forehead ; and she sits there, motion- 
less, looking straight before her with eyes 
that see nothing, absorbed in some vague 
reverie, the Monna Lisa of the Gingerbread 
Fair. 



10 



THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES 



II 



It is half-past three, and the Cours de 
Vincennes is a carnival of colours, sounds 
and movements. Looking from the Place 
de la Nation, one sees a long thin line of 
customers along the stalls of bonbons and 
gingerbread, and the boulevard has the air 
of a black-edged sheet of paper, until the 
eye reaches a point where the shows begin. 
Then the crowd is seen in black patches, 
sometimes large, extending half across the 
road, sometimes small; every now and then 
one of the black patches thins rapidly as the 
people mount the platform, or there is a 
simultaneous movement from one point of 
attraction to another. At one*s back the 
roundabouts are squealing the repertoire 
Paulus, in front there is a continuous deaf- 
ening rumble of drums, with an inextricable 
jangle and jumble of brass bands, each play- 

II 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

ing a different tune, all at once, and all close 
together. Shrill or hoarse voices are heard 
for a moment, to be drowned the next by 
the intolerable drums and cornets. As one 
moves slowly down the long avenue, dis- 
tracted by the cries, the sounds, coming from 
both sides at once, it is quite another aspect 
that is presented by those dingy platforms, 
those gaping canvases of but an hour ago. 
Every platform is alive with human frip- 
pery. A clown in reds and yellows, with 
a floured and rouged face, bangs a big 
drum, an orchestra (sometimes of one, 
sometimes of fifteen) "blows through brass" 
with the full power of its lungs; fulgently 
and scantily attired ladies throng the fore- 
ground, a man in plain clothes squanders 
the remains of a voice in howling the at- 
tractions of the interior, and in the back- 
ground, at a little table, an opulent lady sits 
at the receipt of custom, with the business- 
like solemnity of the dame du comptoir of 

12 



THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES 

a superior restaurant. Occasionally there is 
a pas seul, more often an indifferent waltz, 
at times an impromptu comedy. Outside 
Bidel's establishment a tired and gentle 
dromedary rubs its nose against the pole 
to which it is tied; elsewhere a monkey 
swings on a trapeze; a man addresses the 
crowd with a snake about his shoulders, and 
my Monna Lisa, too, has twined a snake 
around her, and stands holding the little 
malevolent head in her fingers, like an ex- 
quisite and harmless Medusa. 

Under the keen sunlight every colour 
stands out sharply, and to pass between those 
two long lines of gesticulating figures is to 
plunge into an orgy of clashing colours. 
All the women wear the coarsest of worsted 
tights, the usual tint of which is intended 
to be flesh-colour but it varies, through all 
the shades, from the palest of pink to the 
brightest of red. Often the tights are 
patched, sometimes they are not even 

13 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

patched. The tunic may be mauve, or 
orange, or purple, or blue; it is generally 
open in front, showing a close-fitting jersey 
of the same colour as the tights. The arms 
are bare, the faces, as a rule, made up with 
discretion and restraint. There is one 
woman, who must once have been very beau- 
tiful, who appears in ballet skirts; there is 
a man in blue-grey cloak and hood, warriors 
in plumes and cuirass ; but for the most part 
it is the damsels in flesh-coloured tights and 
jerseys who parade on the platforms outside 
the theatres. When they break into a waltz 
it is always the most dissonant of mauves, 
and pinks, and purples that choose one 
another as partners. As the girls move 
carelessly and clumsily round in the dance, 
they continue the absorbing conversations in 
which they are mostly engaged. Rarely 
does anyone show the slightest interest in 
the crowd whose eyes are all fixed — so 
thirstingly! — upon them. They stand or 

14 



THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES 

move as they are told, mechanically, indif- 
ferently, and that is all. Often, but not 
always, well-formed, they have occasionally 
pretty faces as well. There is a brilliant 
little creature, who forms one of the crowd 
of warriors outside the Theatre Cocherie, 
who has quite an individual type of charm 
and intelligence. She has a boyish face, 
little black curls on her forehead, a proud, 
sensitive mouth, and black eyes full of wit 
and defiance. As Miss Angelina, artiste 
gymnasiarque equilibriste et danseuse, goes 
through a very ordinary selection of steps 
("rocks," "scissors," and the like, as they 
are called in the profession). Julienne's eyes 
devour every movement ; she is learning how 
to do it, and will practise it herself without 
telling anyone, until she can surprise them 
some day by taking Miss Angelina's place. 



IS 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



III 



But it is at night, towards nine o^clock, 
that the fair is at its best. The painted 
faces, the crude colours, assume their right 
aspect, become harmonious, under the arti- 
ficial light. The dancing pinks and reds 
whirl on the platforms, flash into the gas- 
light, disappear for an instant into a solid 
shadow, against the light, emerge vividly. 
The moving black masses surge to and fro 
before the booths; from the side one sees 
lines of rigid figures, faces that the light 
shows in eager profile. Outside the Theatre 
Cocherie there is a shifting light which turns 
a dazzling glitter, moment by moment, across 
the road; it plunges like a sword into one of 
the trees opposite, casts a glow as of white 
fire over the transfigured green of leaves 
and branches, and then falls off, baffled by 
the impenetrable leafage. As the light drops 
i6 



THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES 

suddenly on the crowd, an instant before 
only dimly visible, it throws into fierce re- 
lief the intent eyes, the gaping mouths, the 
unshaven cheeks, darting into the hollows 
of broken teeth, pointing cruelly at every 
scar and wrinkle. At every return it daz- 
zles the eyes of one tall girl at the end of 
the platform, among the warriors ; she turns 
away her head, or grimaces. In the middle 
of the platform there is a violent episode 
of horse-play: a man in plain clothes be- 
labours two clowns with a sounding lath, 
and is in turn belaboured; then the three 
rush together pell-mell, roll over one an- 
other, bump down the steps to the ground, 
return, recommence, with the vigour and 
gusto of schoolboys in a scrimmage. 
Further on a white clown tumbles on a 
stage, girls in <pink, and black, and white 
move vaguely before a dark red curtain, 
brilliant red breeches sparkle, a girl en 
g argon, standing at one side in a graceful 

17 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



pose which reveals her fine outUnes, shows 
a motionless silhouette, cut out sharply 
against the light; the bell rings, the drum 
beats, a large blonde- wigged woman, dressed 
in Louis XIV costume, cries her wares 
and holds up placards, white linen with 
irregular black lettering. Outside a box- 
ing booth a melancholy lean man blows 
inaudibly into a horn; his cheeks puff, 
his fingers move, but not a sound can 
be heard above the thunder of the 
band of Laurent le Dompteur. Before 
the ombres chinoises a lamp hanging to 
a tree sheds its light on a dark red back- 
ground, on the gendarme who moves across 
the platform, on the pink and green hat of 
madame, and on her plump hand supporting 
her chin, on monsieur's irreproachable silk 
hat and white whiskers. Near by is a 
theatre where they are giving the Cloches 
de Corneville, and the platform is thronged 
with lounging girls in tights. They turn 

i8 



THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES 

their backs unconcernedly to the crowd, and 
the Hght falls on pointed shoulder-blades, 
one distinguishes the higher vertebrae of 
the spine. A man dressed in a burlesque 
female costume kicks a print dress extrava- 
gantly into the air, flutters a ridiculous fan, 
with mincing airs, with turns and somer- 
. saults. People begin to enter, and the plat- 
form clears ; a line of figures marches along 
the narrow footway running the length of 
the building, to a curtained entrance at the 
end. The crowd in front melts away, 
straggles across the road to another show, 
straggling back again as the drum begins 
to beat and the line of figures marches back 
to the stage. 

In front, at the outskirts of the crowd, 
two youngsters in blouses have begun to 
dance, kicking their legs in the air to the 
strains of a mazurka; and now two women 
circle. A blind man, in the space between 
two booths, sits holding a candle in his hand, 

19 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



a pitiful object; the light falls on his straw- 
hat, the white placard on his breast, his face 
is in shadow. As I pause before a booth 
where a fat woman in tights flourishes a 
pair of boxing gloves, I find myself by the 
side of my Monna Lisa of the enchanted 
garden. Her show is over, and she is watch- 
ing the others. She wears a simple black 
dress and a dark blue apron; her hair is 
neatly tied back with a ribbon. She is quite 
ready to be amused, and it is not only I, 
but the little professional lady, who laughs 
at the farce which begins on a neighbour- 
ing stage, where a patchwork clown comes 
out arm in arm with a nightmare of a 
pelican, the brown legs very human, the 
white body and monstrous orange bill very 
fearsome and fantastic. A pale Pierrot 
languishes against a tree: I see him as I 
turn to go, and, looking back, I can still dis- 
tinguish the melancholy figure above the 
waltz of the red, and pink, and purple under* 
20 



THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES 

the lights, the ceaseless turning of those 
human dolls, with their fixed smile, their 
painted colours. 



IV 



It is half-past eleven, and the fair is over 
for the night. One by one the lights are 
extinguished; faint glimmers appear in the 
little square windows of dressing rooms and 
sleeping rooms; silhouettes cross and re- 
cross the drawn blinds, with lifted arms and 
huddled draperies. The gods of tableaux 
vivants, negligently modern in attire, stroll 
off across the road to find a comrade, rolling 
a cigarette between their fingers. Monna 
Lisa passes rapidly, with her brother, car- 
rying a marketing basket. And it is a steady 
movement townwards; the very stragglers 
prepare to go, stopping, from time to time, 
to buy a great gingerbread pig with Jean 

21 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



or Suzanne scrawled in great white letters 
across it. Outside one booth, not yet closed, 
I am arrested by the desolation of a little 
frail creature, with a thin, suffering, painted 
face, his pink legs crossed, who sits motion- 
less by the side of the great drum, looking 
down wearily at the cymbals that he still 
holds in his hands. In the open spaces 
roundabouts turn, turn, a circle of moving 
lights, encircled by a thin line of black 
shadows. The sky darkens, a little wind is 
rising; the night, after this day of heat, will 
be stormy. And still, to the waltz measure 
of the roundabouts, turning, turning franti- 
cally, the last lingerers defy the midnight, a 
dance of shadows. 
1896, 



225 



MONTMARTRE AND THE 
LATIN QUARTER 



MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN 
QUARTER 

Of all places for a holiday, Paris, to my 
mind, is the most recreative; but not the 
Paris of the English tourist. To the Eng- 
lish tourist Paris consists in the Champs- 
Elysees and the Grands Boulevards, with, 
of course, the shops in the Rue de Rivoli. 
In other words, he selects out of all Paris 
precisely what is least Parisian. The Rue 
de Rivoli always reminds me of Boulogne; 
the one is the Englishman's part of Paris, 
as the other is the Englishman's part of 
France, and their further resemblances are 
many and intimate. The Champs-Elysees 
have their moments and their hours of in- 
terest ; it may be admitted that they are only 
partially Anglicised. As for the Grands 
Boulevards, which are always, certainly, at- 
tractive to any genuine lover of cities, to 
25 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



any real amateur of crowds, they are, after 
all, not Parisian, but cosmopolitan. They 
are simply the French equivalent of that 
great, complex, inextricable concourse of 
people which we find instinctively crowding, 
in London, along Piccadilly; in Berlin, down 
the Unter den Linden; in Madrid, over the 
Prado; in Venice, about the Piazza: a 
crowding of people who have come together 
from all the ends of the earth, who have, 
if tourist likes to meet tourist, mutual at- 
traction enough; who have, undoubtedly, 
the curiosity of an exhibition or an ethno- 
logical museum; but from whom you will 
never learn the characteristics of the coun- 
try in which you find them. What is really 
of interest in a city or in a nation is not 
that which it has, however differentiated, 
in common with other nations and cities, 
but that which is unique in it, the equivalent 
of which you will search for in vain else- 
where. Now the two parts of Paris which 
26 




QuARTiEx Latin, io A. M. 



MONTH ARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER 

are unique, the equivalent of which you 
will search for in vain elsewhere, are the 
Quartier Latin and Montmartre. And these 
are just the quarters which the English 
tourist, as a rule, knows least about; fancy- 
ing, though he may, that he knows them, 
because he has climbed Montmartre as far 
as the Moulin-Rouge, and gone leftward one 
Saturday night as far as Bullier. 

I have often, when sitting at the Bras- 
serie d'Harcourt, on the "les serious" side, 
the side facing the Boulevard Saint-Michel, 
tried to imagine that gay, noisy, and irre- 
sponsible throng which surges in and out of 
the doors, overflows the terrasse, and scat- 
ters up and down the street; I have tried, 
but always in vain, to imagine it, so to 
speak, in terms of London. No, it is simply 
unthinkable. That Piccadilly (or is it to 
be the Strand?) will some day more or less 
approximate to the continental idea of the 
necessary comforts of life, that it will have 
27 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

its cafes like every other civilised city, and 
so redeem England from the disgrace of 
being the only country where men have to 
drink, like cattle, standing; that, I have no 
doubt, is merely a matter of time; it will 
come. But there will never be a Boul' 
Mich* in London. It is as impossible as 
Marcelle and Suzanne. The BouF Mich' 
is simply the effervescence of irrepressible 
youth; and youth in London never effer- 
vesces, or only in one man here, in one 
woman there. The stern British moralist 
tells us it is indeed fortunate that we have 
not a Boulevard Saint-Michel in our midst; 
that we have not, and never can have, a 
d'Harcourt ; and he points to the vice which 
flaunts there. No doubt whatever vice is 
to be found in the Quartier, does very much 
flaunt itself. But is it not really less vicious, 
in a certain sense, than the corresponding 
thing in London, which takes itself so 
seriously as well as cautiously, is so self- 
28 



MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER 

convinced of evil-doing and has all the un- 
healthy excitement of an impotent but per- 
sistent Puritan conscience? However, be 
this as it may, the real peculiarity of the 
youth of the Latin quarter is its friendly 
gaiety, its very boisterous sociability, its ex- 
traordinary capacity for prolonging the 
period of its existence — the existence of that 
volatile quantity, youth — into the period of 
beards and the past thirties. You may say, 
if you like, that it is ridiculous, that grown- 
up men should know better than to run 
about the street with long hair and large 
hats, singing and shouting from eleven in the 
evening till two in the morning. It has its 
ridiculous side, certainly, but it is remark- 
able, above all, as a survival of youth, and 
it implies a joie de vivre, which is a very 
valuable and not a very common quality. 

The place and the moment where the 
Quartier Latin becomes — what shall I say? 
— its best self, are upon those fine Sunday 
29 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

afternoons when the band plays in the Lux- 
embourg Gardens. Does every one know 
Manet's picture of the scene: the long 
frock-coats, the long hair, the very tall hats, 
the voluminous skirts of the ladies, and the 
enchantment of those green trees over and 
between and around it all? Well, the real 
thing is as delightful even as a Manet; and 
when I am in Paris, in the fine weather, I 
consider that Sunday is not quite Sunday if 
a part of it is not spent just as those people 
in the picture spend it. Early in the after- 
noon groups begin to form; Marcelle and 
Suzanne bring their sewing, or a book of 
verses, for a pretence, and each has her little 
circle about her. The chairs around the 
band-stand fill gradually, the tables of the 
little green hiwette spread further and 
further outwards, leaving just room for the 
promenade which will soon begin, that 
church-parade of such another sort from 
the London one, so blithely — 
30 




QuARTiER Latin, 5 P. M. 



MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER 

"within this fair, 
This quiet church of leaves." 

Further out again, along the terrace, be- 
tween the last trees and the line and curve 
of the balustrade, there is an outer, quite 
different, rim of mothers and nurses and 
children. And now the band is playing, it 
is the ballet music in Faust; and the shim- 
mery music, coming like sunshine into the 
sunlights of such an afternoon, just here 
and now, sounds almost beautiful, as things 
do always when they are beautifully in 
keeping. Marcelle and Suzanne, between 
two shouts of laughter, feel the poetry of 
the moment; they are even silent, biting 
meditatively the corner of a fanciful hand- 
kerchief. And the slowly moving throng 
which trails around the narrow alley be- 
tween the chairs is no longer the noisy; ir- 
repressible throng which last night acted the 
farce of the monome from door to door of 
the d'Harcourt ; it is the other, more serious, 
31 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

more sentimental side of that vivid youth 
which incarnates and is the incarnation of 
the Quartier Latin. 

Up at Montmartre, how different is the 
atmosphere, yet how typically Parisian! 
To reach Montmartre you have to go right 
through Paris, and I always think the 
route followed by that charming, omnibus, 
the "BatignoUes-Clichy-Odeon," shows one 
more of Paris, in the forty or fifty minutes 
that it takes, than any other route I know. 
It is an April evening; nine o'clock has just 
struck. I am tired of turning over the 
books under the arcades of the Odeon, and 
I mount the omnibus. The heavy wheels 
rattle over the rough stones, down the 
broad, ugly Rue de Tournon. We curve 
through narrow, winding streets, which be- 
gin to grow Catholic, blossoming out into 
windowfuls of wax-candles, as we near 
Saint - Sulpice, our first stopping - place. 
After we have left the broad, always some- 
32 



MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER 

what prim and quiet open space, dominated 
by the formidable bulk of the curious, com- 
posite church, it is by more or less feature- 
less ways that we reach the Boulevard 
Saint-Germain, coming out suddenly under 
the trees, so beautiful, I always think, in 
that odd, acute glitter which gas-light gives 
them. There are always a good many people 
waiting here; my side of the imperial is 
soon full. We cross the road, and the two 
horses start at full speed, as they invari- 
ably do at that particular place, down the 
Rue des Saints-Peres. The street is long 
and narrow, few people are passing; all the 
life of the street seems to be concentrated 
behind those lighted windows, against which 
we pass so close. I catch a glimpse of in- 
teriors ; a table with a red table-cloth, a lamp 
upon it, a girl sewing; she leans forward, 
and the lights crimson her cheek. Another 
room, an old woman holding a candle moves 
across the window ; in another I see the back 
33 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

of an arm-chair, just a tuft of blonde hair 
overtopping it; there are two candles on 
the table, several books. Farther on, the 
curtains are drawn, I can see only a sil- 
houette, the face and bust of a woman, 
clearly outlined, as she sits motionless. We 
turn the corner, are on the Quai, and now 
crossing slowly the Pont des Arts. The 
heavy masonry of the Louvre looms up in 
front; to right and left below, the Seine, 
draped in shadow, with sharp points of white 
and red where the lights strike the water. 
Then begins the jolting and rumbling over 
the horrible pavement of the Louvre, the 
sudden silence as the wheels glide over the 
asphalfe, and we emerge, through that im- 
possibly narrow archway, into the Rue de 
Rivoli; in two minutes we are at the Palais 
Royal. For a moment I see the twisting 
currents of cabs, down the Avenue de 
rOpera, and then we are in the interminable 
Rue de Richelieu, broken only by the long, 

34 



MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER 

but new, monotony of the dreary Biblio- 
theque Nationale, and that odd, charming 
Httle square opposite, with its old houses, its 
fountain, its dingy trees, its seats. At last 
we have reached the Grands Boulevards, 
and we edge our way slowly across, between 
the omnibuses and cabs. The boulevard is 
not crowded, it is the hour of the theatres; 
and then I am facing that side of the street 
which I never care for, the virtuous side 
(despite Julien's). When we turn up the 
Rue Le Peletier, out of the broad, lighted 
space stretching on in a long vista between 
the trees and lamp-posts, we find ourselves, 
ere long, in a new atmosphere; first, that 
ambiguous quarter of the Chaussee d'Antin, 
then the franker Montmartre. As we toil 
up the steep Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, 
past that severe but eccentric church which 
seems trying to block our way, but in vain, 
I watch curiously the significant windows, 
with their lights and their blinds. As the 
35 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



horses turn aside, Clichy-wards I get down ; 
there, just before me, as if at the other end 
of the street, across the broad open space 
of the Place Blanche, are the red bulk and 
waving sails of the Moulin-Rouge. And 
that is one of the landmarks of Montmartre. 

They tell me that Montmartre is not what 
it once was, in the great days of the 
Chateau-Rouge, of the Boule-Noire. And 
even in my time there has been a certain 
falling away; for have I not seen the death 
of the Elysee-Montmartre, and the trivial 
resurrection, out of its ashes, of a certain 
characterless Trianon-Concert? 

Still, if some of the glories of Montmartre 
are gone, Montmartre remains, and it re- 
mains unique. In no other city can I recall 
anything in itself so sordidly picturesque as 
those crawling heights, which lead up to the 
Butte, so wonderful as the vision of the city 
which the Butte gives one. I know Mont- 
martre chiefly by night ; it is not a place for 

36 




QuAKTiER Latin, 2 A. M. 



MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER 

the day; and the view of Paris which I am 
thinking of is the view of Paris by night. 
When you have dimbed as high as you can 
cHmb, ending almost with ladders, you reach 
a dreary little strip of ground, in which a 
rough wooden paling seems to hold you back 
from falling sheer into the abyss of Paris. 
Under a wild sky, as I like to see it, the 
city floats away endlessly, a vague, immense 
vision of forests of houses, softened by 
fringes of actual forest; here and there a 
dome, a tower, brings suddenly before the 
eyes a definite locality ; but for the most part 
it is but a succession of light and shade, 
here tall white houses coming up out of a 
pit of shadow, there an unintelligible mass 
of darkness, sheared through by an inex- 
plicable arrow of light. Right down below, 
one looks straight into the lighted windows, 
distinguishing the outline of the lamp on 
the table, of the figure which moves about 
the room; while, in the far distance, there 
37 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

is nothing but a faint, reddish haze, rising 
dubiously into the night, as if the lusts of 
Paris smoked to the skies. Night after 
night I have been up to this odd, fascinating 
little corner, merely to look at all I had left 
behind; and I have been struck by the at- 
traction which this view obviously has for 
the somewhat unpleasant and unimpression- 
able people who inhabit the neighbourhood. 
Aristide Bruant's heroes and heroines, the 
lady on her way to Saint-Lazare, the 
gentleman — who knows? — perhaps to La 
Roquette, they rest from their labours at 
times, and, leaning over the wooden paling, 
I am sure enjoy Paris impressionistically. 
Perhaps this is one of the gifts of the 
esprit Montmartre, that philosophy of the 
pavement which has always been more or 
less localised in this district. Here at 
Montmartre of course, and of it essentially, 
are almost all the public balls, the really 
Parisian cafe-concerts, which exist in Paris. 

38 




Le Rat Mort 



MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER 

The establishments in the Champs-Elysees 
are after an order of their own; the FoHes- 
Bergere is an unsuccessful attempt to imitate 
an English music-hall and a successful at- 
tempt to attract the English public; but 
amusing Paris, and Paris which amuses it- 
self, goes to Montmartre. The cabaret of 
Aristide Bruant has lost something of its 
special character since Bruant took to sing- 



§e ifeu^ ifece\kit'j>afn)i G joyeu^c. e\ cflgatjJc cHci)liIe. 
-qai frBqucijle Joula^ Q^nuH^ 

Jkx) n)ln)e fcnjps qaat)« CHvSije ^pigi)e« etb«?cljan)pggi)«s oatu? 



■ Invitation Card of the Rat Mort 

39 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

ing at the Ambassadeurs ; the Concert Lis- 
bonne, which was once so pleasantly eccen- 
tric, has become ordinary; but there is still 
the true ring of Montmartre in the Carillon, 
that homely little place in the Rue de la 
Tour-d'Auvergne, and the baser kind of 
Montmartre wit in the Concert des Con- 
cierges, not far off. And then, to end the 
evening, is there not the Rat Mort, of which 
a conscientious English lady novelist once 
gave so fanciful a picture? The Rat Mort, 
which ends the evening, sums up Mont- 
martre; not wisely, perhaps, not prudently, 
but with "some emotions and a moral." 
1904. 



40 



PARIS AND IDEAS 



PARIS AND IDEAS 

I HAVE been turning over a book which 
has called up many memories, and which 
has set me thinking about people and ideas. 
The book is called French Portraits: being 
'Appreciations of the Writers of Young 
France, is published in Boston and it is 
written by an American, who writes some- 
what hysterically, but in a spirit of generous 
appreciation. It is pretentious, as the people 
in the Latin Quarter are pretentious; that 
is to say, innocently, and on behalf of ideas. 
It all keeps step, gallantly enough, to a 
march, not Schumann's, of the followers of 
David against the Philistines. One seems to 
see a straggling company wandering down 
at night from the heights of Montmartre: 
the thin faces, long hair, flat-brimmed tall 
hats and wide-brimmed soft hats, the 
broken gestures, eager voices, desperate 
43 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

light-heartedness. They have not more 
talent than people over here; they are much 
more likely to waste, as it is called, what- 
ever talent they have ; but these people whom 
this book calls up before us are after all 
the enthusiasts of ideas, and their follies 
bubble up out of a drunkenness at least as 
much spiritual as material. Few of the 
idealists I have known have been virtuous; 
that is to say they have chosen their virtues 
after a somewhat haphazard plan of their 
own; some of them have loved absinthe, 
others dirt, all idleness; but why expect 
everything at once? Have we, who lack 
ideas and ideals, enough of the solid virtues 
to put into the balance against these weighty 
abstractions? I only ask the question; but 
I persist in thinking that we have still a 
great deal to learn from Paris, and especially 
on matters of the higher morality. 

Well, this writer, in his vague, heated, 
liberal way, scatters about him, in this large 

IT 




/ 



Cartoon of Jean Moreas by Emile Cohx 
AND Signature of Moreas 



PARIS AND IDEAS 



book of his, many excellent criticisms of 
people and things; flinging them in our 
faces, indeed, and as often the stem with- 
out the flower as the flower without the 
stem. He tells us about Verlaine and 
Mallarme, about Barres, Marcel Schwob, 
Maeterlinck, Moreas, Pierre Louys, and a 
score of others; not as precisely as one 
might have wished, often indeed rather mis- 
leadingly, but always with at least the 
freshness of a personal interest. An un- 
wary reader might, it is true, imagine that 
the chapter on Maeterlinck records an 
actual conversation, an actual walk through 
Brussels: instead of a conversation wholly 
imaginary, made up of scraps out of the 
essays, rather casually tossed together. Such 
a reader will indeed be beset by pitfalls, and 
will perhaps come away with several curious 
impressions: such as that Adolphe Rette is 
a great poet and Henri de Regnier not a 
poet at all. But books are not written for 
45 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

unwary readers, and pitfalls are only 
dangerous to those who have not the agility 
to avoid them. The portraits, especially 
Valloton's clever outlines (mostly repro- 
duced from Remy de Gourmont's two ad- 
mirable volumes of Le Livre des Masques) 
give a serious value to these pages, and 
there are, in all, more than fifty portraits. 
As I turn over the pictures, recognising 
face after face, I am reminded of many 
nights and days during the ten years that 
I have known Paris, and a wheel of memory 
seems to turn in my head like a kaleido- 
scope, flashing out the pictures of my own 
that I keep there. The great sleepy and 
fiery head of Verlaine is in so many of them. 
He lies back in his corner at the Cafe 
FranQois Premier, with his eyes half shut; 
he drags on my arm as we go up the boule- 
vard together ; he shows me his Bible in the 
little room up the back stairs; he nods his 
nightcap over a great picture book as he sits 

46 



PARIS AND IDEAS 



Up in bed at the hospital. I see Mallarme 
as he opens the door to me on that fourth 
floor of the Rue de Rome, with his exquisite 
manner of welcome. Catulle Mendes lec- 
tures on the poetry of the Parnassians, read- 
ing Glatigny*s verses with his suave and 
gliding intonation. I see Maeterlinck in all 
the hurry of a departure, between two port- 
manteaus; Marcel Schwob in a quiet corner 
by his own fireside, discussing the first 
quarto of Hamlet. Maurice Barres stands 
before an after-luncheon camera, with the 
Princess Mathilde on his arm, in an im- 
provised group on the lawn. Jean Moreas, 
with his practical air, thunders out a poem 
of his own to a waitress in a Bouillon Duval. 
I find myself by the side of Adolphe Rette 
at a strange performance in which a play 
of Tola Dorian is followed by a play of 
Rachilde. Stuart Merrill introduces me to 
an editor at the Bullier, Viele-Griffin speaks 
English with an evident reluctance at the 
47 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



office of the Mercure de France, where 
Henri de Regnier is silent under his eye- 
glass. It is a varied company, and there are 
all the others whom I do not know, or whom 
I have met only out of Paris, like Verhaeren. 
In those houses, those hospitals, those cafes, 
many of the ideas on which, consciously or 
unconsciously, how many of us are now liv- 
ing, came into existence. Meanwhile, how 
many ideas, of any particular importance to 
anybody, have come into existence in the 
London drawing-rooms and clubs of the 
period, where our men of letters meet one 
another, with a mutually comfortable re- 
solve not to talk "shop" ? 

Ideas, it may be objected, are one thing; 
achievement is quite another. Yes, achieve- 
ment is quite another, but achievement may 
sometimes be left out of the question not 
unprofitably. It is too soon to see how much 
has been actually done by the younger men 
I have named; but think how Maeterlinck 
48 



PARIS AND IDEAS 



has brought a new soul into the drama; has 
brought (may one not say?) the soul into 
drama. Think what Verlaine has done for 
French poetry, ending a tradition, which 
only waited extinction, and creating in its 
place a new law of freedom, of legitimate 
freedom, full of infinite possibilities. And, 
coming down to the very youngest school of 
"Naturists" (or is there, as I write, a still 
younger one already?), is there not a sig- 
nificant ferment of thought, a convinced 
and persuasive restatement of great princi- 
ples, which every generation has to discover 
over again for itself, under some new form ? 
All these men, or, to be exact, nearly all 
these men, have thought before writing, 
have thought about writing, have thought 
about other things than writing. They 
have taken the trouble to form theories, they 
have not hesitated to lay a foundation before 
building. The foundation has not always 
been solid, nor the building a fine piece of 
49 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

architecture. But at least literature in 
France is not a mere professional business, 
as so much of what passes for literature 
is in England, it is not written for money, 
and it is not written mechanically, for the 
mere sake of producing a book of verse 
or prose. In Paris the word art means a 
very serious and a very definite thing: a 
thing for which otherwise very unheroic 
people will cheerfully sacrifice whatever 
chances they may have of worldly success. 
Over here I know remarkably few people 
who seem to me to be sacrificing as much 
for art as almost any one of those disorderly 
young men who walk so picturesquely in the 
Luxembourg Gardens when the band plays. 
Well, the mere desire to excel, the mere 
faithfulness to a perhaps preposterous 
theory of one's duty to art, the mere attempt 
to write literature, is both an intellectual and 
a moral quality, which it is worth while to 
recognise for what it is worth, even if the 
■ SO 



PARIS AND IDEAS 



outcome of it, for the moment, should but 
be some Pere Ubu in all the shapelessness 
of the embryo. Where we have the germ of 
life, life will in time work out its own ac- 
complishment. And for ideas, which are the 
first stirrings of life about to begin we must 
still, I think, look to France. 
1900. 



51 



THE POET OF THE BATS 



THE POET OF THE BATS 

Visitors to the Salon du Champ de Mars 
cannot fail to have noticed a full-length 
portrait by Whistler, the portrait of a gentle- 
man of somewhat uncertain age, standing 
in an attitude half chivalrous, half funam- 
bulesque, his hand lightly posed on a small 
cane. There is something distinguished, 
something factitious, about the whole figure, 
and on turning to the catalogue one could 
not but be struck by a certain fantastic ap- 
propriateness in the name, Comte Robert de 
Montesquiou-Fezensac, even if that name 
conveyed no further significance. To those 
who know something of the curiosities of 
French literary society, the picture has its 
interest as a portrait of the oddest of 
Parisian "originals," the typical French 
"aesthete," from whose cult of the hortensia 
Oscar Wilde no doubt learnt the worship of 
55 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



Of.>y? gflg^a.^ A-> »''~i> Sc» ^ C*ja. ret tt a^ cJLoSe^ 



«^ionj 



O^ CJtJiaLif Ca/Pl^ 4^aLJ>t^ 1^^ 

MONTESQUIOU'S PICTURESQUE HANDWRITING 

S6 



THE POET OF THE BATS 



the sunflower; while to readers of Huys- 
mans it has the further interest of being a 
portrait of the real des Esseintes, the hero 
of that singular and remarkable romance of 
the Decadence, A Rebours. It is scarcely- 
likely that many of the people, or indeed any 
of the English people who saw the picture, 
knew that it was also the portrait of a poet, 
the poet of the bats, Les Chauves-Souris, 
an enormous volume of five hundred closely 
printed pages. 

The Comte de Montesquiou, though liv- 
ing, and a personage, and of late a fait divers 
in the papers for purely mundane reasons, 
is none the less a legendary being, of whom 
all the stories that are told may very likely 
be true, of whom at all events nothing can 
be told more fantastic than the truth. Has 
he, or had he, really a series of rooms, 
draped in different tones, in one of which 
he could only read French, in another only 
Latin? Did he really gild the back of the 

57 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



tortoise, and then inlay it with jewels, so that 
it might crawl over the carpet in arabesques 
of living colour, until the poor beast died 
of the burden of its unwonted splendour? 
Did he really invent an orchestra of per- 
fumes, an orchestra of liqueurs, on which 
he could play the subtlest harmonies of the 
senses? He certainly at one time possessed 
an incredible wardrobe, from which he 
would select and combine, with infinite 
labour, the costume of the day; apologising, 
on a certain misty afternoon, for not em- 
ploying the Scotch symphony which had once 
before so perfectly suited a similar day: 
"but it takes my servant so long to prepare 
it !" On one occasion a distinguished French 
writer, one of the most recent of Academi- 
cians, was astonished, on opening a letter 
from the Comte de Montesquiou, to find 
along with the letter a manuscript copy of 
Balzac's Cure de Tours, written in an il- 
literate hand. Nothing whatever was said 

S8 



THE POET OF THE BATS 



about it, and on meeting his correspondent, 
the Academician inquired if it was by over- 
sight that the manuscript had been enclosed. 
"Oh, no," was the answer, "the fact is, my 
cook and my butler are always quarrelling, 
and in order to occupy them and keep them 
out of mischief, I give them Balzac's stories 
to copy out; and I send the copies to my 
friends. Pere Goriot I sent to Leconte de 
Lisle: I only sent you a short one." 

Until a year or two ago, the Comte de 
Montesquiou indulged in the luxury of en- 
joying an artistic reputation without having 
done anything, or at least without having 
published. It was known that he wrote 
poems, but no one had seen them; he had 
resolved to out-Mallarme Mallarme, and he 
succeeded so well that it was generally sup- 
posed that these vague, shrouded poems were 
the quintessence of what was perversely 
exquisite in spirit and in form, probably few 
in number, but no doubt not less faultless 

59 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



than original. All at once the veil was 
dropped; the huge volume of the Chauves- 
Souris appeared, and the reticent and mys- 
terious poet was found soliciting press- 
notices, paying actresses to recite his poems, 
giving receptions at his "Pavillion" at 
Versailles, and buttonholing distinguished 
poets, to ask them what they really thought 
of his poems. It is a little difficult to say 
what one thinks of these poems. They are 
divided, according to an apparently rigid 
but entirely unintelligible plan, into a great 
many divisions, of which these are the 
principal: Zaimph, Demi-Teintes (Pre- 
ludes), Tenebres (Interludes) , Betes et Gens 
(Ombres Chinoises), Penombres Office de la 
Lune (Litanies et Antiennes) , Clairiere 
(Coryphees), Jets de Feu et Eaux d' Artifice 
(Aqua-Teintes), Lunatiques, Vieilles Lunes 
et Lunes Rousses, Candidates (Neomenies) 
Sy^ygie (Ombre portee) Ancien Regime. 
All this is supposed to represent "une con- 
60 



THE POET OF THE BATS 



centration du mystere nocturne," and a prose 
commentary, which certainly makes dark- 
ness more visible, is added, because, the 
author tells us, "des sollicitudes amies 
veulent qu'un leger fil permette a des esprits 
curieux et bienveillants de reconnaitre vite 
le labyrinthe, et, plus expressement, d'ap- 
precier la division architectonique, voire 
architecturale, peut-etre le meilleur merite 
du poeme." Probably nothing more calmly 
crazy than this book — in which there is all 
the disorder without any of the delirium of 
madness — was ever written: the book cer- 
tainly has its interest. The possibilities of 
verse for the expression of fluent, contorted, 
and interminable nonsense have never been 
more cogently demonstrated than in the 
pages from which I cull at random these 
two stanzas: 

"Terreur des Troglodytes, 
Sur leurs tapis de Turquies, 

6i 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

Et de tous les rats de tes 
Batrakhomyomakhyes, 

Homere: Meridarpax, 
Voleur de portioncule; 
Troxartes et Psikharpax, 
Par qui Peleion recule." 

This is quite an average specimen of the 
manner of the poet of the bats : if, however, 
one prefers a greater simpHcity, we need but 
turn the page, and we read: 

"La nuit tous les chats sont gris, 
Toutes les souris sont fauves: 
Chauves-souris et chat-chauves, 
Chats-chauves chauves-souris !" 

It is not a quality that the author would 
probably appreciate, but the quality that 
most impresses in this book is the extraor- 
dinary diligence that must have been re- 
quired to produce it. There is not a spon- 
taneous verse in it, from beginning to end 
62 



THE POET OF THE BATS 



few would seem to have required thought, 
but none could have failed to demand labour. 
At its best it has that funambulesque air of 
the Whistler portrait ; when it is not playing 
tricks it is ambling along stolidly; but the 
quintessential des Esseintes, the father and 
child of the Decadence, well, des Esseintes 
has no rival to fear in the merely real Comte 
Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac. 

1895. 



63 



SONGS OF THE STREETS 



SONGS OF THE STREETS 

The verse of Aristide Bruant, written, as 
it is, to be sung, and before the casual and 
somewhat disorderly audience of a small 
cabaret near what was once the Elysee- 
Montmartre; written, as it is, mainly in the 
slang of the quarter the uncomely argot of 
those boulevards exterieurs which are the 
haunts of all that is most sordidly depraved 
in Paris, — this verse is yet, in virtue of its 
rare qualities of simplicity, sincerity, and 
poignant directness, verse of really serious, 
and not inconsiderable, literary merit. Like 
the powerful designs of Steinlen, which il- 
lustrate them, these songs are for the most 
part ugly enough, they have no charm or 
surprise of sentiment, they appeal to one by 
no imported elegances, by none of the con- 
ventionalities of pathos or pity. They take 
the real life of poor and miserable and vi- 

67 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



cious people, their real sentiments, their 
typical moments of emotion or experience — 
as in the very terrible and very blasphemous 
song of the rain, and the poor soaked vaga- 
bond ready to "curse God and die" — and 
they say straight out, in the fewest words, 
just what such people would really say, with 
a wonderful art in the reproduction of the 
actual vulgar accent. Take, for instance, 
the thief, shut up a Mazas, who writes to 
his p'tit' Rose, asking her to send him un 
peu d'oseille (a Httle "oof") : 

Tu dois ben ga a ton p'tit homme 
Qu'a p't'et' ete mechant pour toi, 
Mais qui t'aimait ben, car, en somme, 
Si j'te flaupais, tu sais pourquoi. 
A present qu'me v'la dans les planques 
Et qu'je n'peux pus t'coller des tas, 
Tu n'te figur's pas c'que tu m'manques, 
A Mazas. 

Faut que j'te d'mande encor' que qu'chose, 
^a s'rait qu' t'aill's voir un peu mes vieux. 

68 




w- f^"^ TivfL^ .A^^ 





Aristide Bruant (From a Photograph) 



/// 



L~ 



SONGS OF THE STREETS 



Vas-y, dis, j't'en pri', ma p'tit' Rose, 
Malgre qu't'es pas bien avec eux. 
Je n'sais rien de c'qui leur arrive. . . . 
Vrai, c'est pas pour fair' du pallas, 
Mais j'voudrais bien qu'moman m'ecrive, 
A Mazas. 

Then there is the decrepit old beggar; the 
"Hly-livered" creature (j'ai les foi's blancs) 
who laments his useless cowardice in regard 
to matters of assault and battery, but is 
candid enough to think that at all events he 
will come to no violent end himself: 

Ma tete . . . alle aura des ch'veux blancs, 

the socialist workman, with his Faut pus 
d'tout ga . . . faut pus de rien; the street- 
walker, her lover and her jealousies, the 
grave-digger, who ends all: 

Comm' des marie's, couverts d'fleurs, 
Tous les matins on m'en apporte, 
Avec leurs parfums, leurs odeurs. . . . 
Moi j'trouv' que ga sent bon, la morte. 

69 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



CiKQOiius ANNie. 



Lb N0M<tao:- lo CsKTuns. 



Le Mirliton 

JO URN A I, I L LUSTRE 
paraissiDt tros icr^guli^romeul une douzaine de fois par ao. 

FariB, an an: 3 fir. Ddpartements, im as: '6 fr. 

■ DRUBI; 84, lOUlCVABO ROCHECHOOAgT, PARIS 

Direoteur: AristidE BRUANT 



I<ES DOS (Dessin de Jkan Cailloo). 




.^v'-"" I 



t>li:( d' marmite. plus d'boullont 



Cover Page of Le Mirliton 

70 



SONGS OF THE STREETS 



J'les prends dans mes bras, a mon tour, 
Et pis j'les berce. . . . Et pis j'les couche, 
En r'inflant la goule d'amour 
Qui s'eshappe encor' de leur bouche. 

You may say that these are not agreeable 
people to be introduced to, and here is a 
book, certainly, which it is open to every 
one not to read. But such people exist in 
real life, and they are brought before us 
here, as they so rarely are in the literature 
which professes to be realistic, with an ab- 
solute realism. Bruant's taste lies in the 
direction of a somewhat macabre humour; 
he gives us, by preference, the darker side 
of these dark and shadowed Hnes; but if 
there is much that he leaves out of the pic- 
ture, at all events he introduces nothing into 
it which is not to be found in the reality 
which it professes to copy. Compare, for 
instance, les gueux of Bruant with those of 
Richepin. Bruant is a human document, a 
bit of crude but exact observation ; Richepin 

71 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



gives us nothing but impossible rhetoric 
about impossible persons. And who would 
not give all the pseudo-philosophy, the pre- 
tentious and preposterous pessimism of the 
writer of Les Blasphemes for this little 
casual, irresponsible moral, the comment on 
the end of a nameless soldier who had been 
guillotined for committing a murder: 

S'i's'ralt parti pour el 'Tonquin, 
I's's'rait fait crever Tcasaquin 

Comm' Riviere. . . . 
Un jour on aurait p't'et' grave, 
Sur un marbre ou sur un pave, 

L'nom d'sa miere. 

So resigned, in so desperate a resignation 
under whatever fate may send, are these 
children of the gutter ; philosophers, in their 
way, since they can accept fortune or mis- 
fortune without surprise, if also without 
thankfulness. Their resignation, their sav- 
ageries, brutal affections, drunken gaieties, 
72 



SONGS OF THE STREETS 



obscene delights; all these Bruant has real- 
ised and presented in the two volumes of 
Dans la Rue, which sum up, as nothing else 
in contemporary literature does, the whole 
life of the streets, where that life is most 
typical, curious, and interesting, in Paris, 
along the dreary sweep of the outer boule- 
vards. 

1895. 



73 



A BOOK OF FRENCH VERSES 



A BOOK OF FRENCH VERSES 

Years ago, when I was in Paris, and used 
to go and see Verlaine every week in his 
hospital, I remember he burst out suddenly- 
one day into eulogies of Charles Cros, and 
asked me if I had ever read Le Coffret de 
Santal. On my saying no, he urged me to 
read it, and began to speak, in his generous 
way, of what it seemed to him he had learnt 
from that poet of one book. It was a good 
while before I succeeded in finding a copy; 
but at last I got it, and read it, I remember, 
at that time, with an enchantment which I 
cannot entirely recapture as I turn over the 
pages again to-day. Not long afterwards I 
was at a literary house, and I overheard 
someone being addressed as Dr. Cros. I 
asked him if he was related to Charles Cros ; 
his brother, he told me. Finding me en- 

77 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

thusiastic, he talked freely, giving me quite 
a new idea of Charles Cros as a man of 
science, I believe the discoverer of something 
or other, as well as a fantastic poet. Dr. 
Cros told me that his brother had left a 
number of MS. poems, at his death in 1888; 
that they were in his own possession, that 
he would be glad to publish them, but that 
Charles Cros was so little known that no 
publisher could be found to undertake the 
publication. I promised to write something 
about Le Coffret de Santal, but, other things 
coming in the way, I wrote nothing. I had 
almost lost sight of the man and his book, 
when, as I was in Paris on my way back 
from Spain, I was unexpectedly reminded 
of my promise. I was talking with Yvette 
Guilbert, whose knowledge of French litera- 
ture has often surprised me ; but I was never 
more surprised than when she said, a-propos 
of nothing at all: "Why have you never 
translated anything from Charles Cros — 

78 




Cartoon of Charles Cros 



A BOOK OF FRENCH VERSES 

you, who have translated so many things 
from Verlaine ?" "But do you know Charles 
Cros ?" I said, forgetting to conceal my sur- 
prise. "But I adore him," she said, and 
began to quote his verses. I promised to 
translate one of his poems. To-day it oc- 
curs to me to keep both my promises. 

Well, as I turn out this Sandal-wood 
Casket, full of bibelots d'emplois incer- 
tains, made out of sourires, fleurs, baisers, 
essences, I seem to find myself at that 
moment in French literature when the 
Parnasse was becoming not less artificially 
naive and perverse at once. It belongs to 
the period of Les Amours Jaunes of Tristan 
Corbiere and the Rimes de Joie of Theodore 
Hannon, both of which you will find praised 
and defined in Huysmans' A Rebours; but 
it is more genuine, and more genuinely 
poetical, than either. Learning much from 
Gautier in his form, from Baudelaire for his 
atmosphere, and, more than from either, 

79 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

from the popular songs of many countries, 
he seems to anticipate Verlaine in 

Des choses absurdes vraiment, 

metre and sentiment. And yet he has still 
the habit of writing in which boats had 

Mat de nacre et voile en satin, 
Rames d'ivoire. 

He seems at times to be accepting every 
commonplace of poetry, but the common- 
places turn diaphanous under his touch, and 
come to us with little pallid, pathetic graces, 
like toys in tears, or as if Dresden China 
shepherdesses had begun to weep. 

Ma belle amie est morte 
Et voila qu'on la porte 
En terre, ce matin. 
En souliers de satin. 

It is all poetry made up by one who has 

lived a faint, scarcely passionate, over-dainty 

80 



A BOOK OF FRENCH VERSES 

life avec les fleurs, avec les femmes. You 
might be deceived into thinking him more 
real, or more unreal, than he is. 

Ce n'est plus I'heure des tendresses 
Jalouses, ni des faux serments, 

but of a kind of remembering tenderness, 
in which there is something of the senses, 
something of chaste ideals, and more self- 
pity than really poignant sorrow. The poem 
called Lento, perhaps the best poem in the 
volume, is wonderfully touching, as it mur- 
murs almost sobbingly in one's ear, going on 
to an effect really of slow music, in its deli- 
cate, returning cadences. It gives us, in its 
evasive, whimsically ironical way, a sort of 
philosophy of just these perfumed sensations 
which can so easily turn painful or over- 
powering. 

Mais il ne faut pas croire a I'ame des contours, 

it cries, with a child's surprise; and it is 
8i 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



with a darker, more macabre sense of the 
soiling mystery of death, and the end of 
beauty, that a poem called Wasted Words, 
which I have translated for a specimen, 
sums up the attitude of the universe towards 
woman and of woman towards the uni- 
verse : — 

After the bath the chambermaid 

Combs out your hair. The peignoir falls 

In pleated folds. You turn your head 
To hear the mirror's madrigals. 

Does not the mirror's voice remind 
Your pride : This body, fair in vain, 

Decrepit shelter of a kind 

Of soul, must find the dust again. 

Then shall this delicate flesh forsake 
The bones it veiled, and worms intrude 

Where all is emptiness, and make 
A busy nest in solitude 

There, no more white ; but brown earth strewn 

Heavily on your bony cheeks. 
No gleaming lustres, but the moon. 

These are the words your mirror speaks. 
S2 



A BOOK OF FRENCH VERSES 

You listen with a soulless smile, 

Too proud to heed the thing they say; 

For woman mocks at time, the while 
To-morrow feeds on yesterday. 

That is characteristic enough, in its touches 
of old sentiment and new, in its not unsuc- 
cessful aim at effect, in its fantastic moder- 
nity; but it is more emphatic than most of 
these poems, which are indeed at times as 
sharp and clear as a Latin epigram, but 
more often vague, floating, really songs, and 
at times daintily disquieting, little perfumed 
cries. Perfume is indeed the word that re- 
turns oftenest under one's pen as one tries 
to evoke the actual atmosphere of these 
pages. The Sandal-wood Casket is a cab- 
inet of scents, or contains one, scenting 
all its other stuffs and trinkets. Baudelaire 
has taught all modern poets the suggestive 
value of perfumes, but no one has ever used 
them with such constant and elaborate 
felicity. Exotic always, now Chinese, now 

83 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

Ethiopian, now gipsy, now the discord of a 
night of insomnia, now the penetrating, un- 
real harmony of a haschisch dream, per- 
fumes steam up out of all these pages; yes, 
even natural perfumes, out of the hayfields 
and hedges of the real country. For Charles 
Cros is not so morbid as one is at first in- 
clined to suppose. Is it really with any 
sincerity that he says : "Je me tue a vouloir 
me civiliser I'ame?" And is all this Parisian 
exoticism really a kind of revenge of nature 
upon one not naturally, or not exclusively, 
limited to what is most like the bibelot in 
humanity ? At all events, here, in the midst 
of these tender, and fantastic, and pathetic 
sentimentalities, are the delightfully hu- 
morous Grams de Sel, which one should 
have heard their writer sing for the full 
enjoyment of them ; the Hareng Saur, which 
has a little immortality of its own, among 
people hardly aware whom it is by; the 
Chanson de Sciilpteurs, which sums up 
84 



A BOOK OF FRENCH VERSES 

Montmartre; and the Brave Homme, which 
anticipates Aristide Bruant. A set of fifteen 
dizains parodies Coppee, doing his Annals 
of the Poor better than he could do them. 
It was the time of paradoxes when this book 
was written ; it has indeed always been very- 
French, and in every time very modern, to 
have irony or humour for a part of one's 
equipment as a poet; and Charles Cros is 
very French, and in his own time was very 
modern. 
1899. 



85 



YVETTE GUILBERT 



AT THE AMBASSADEURS 
To 

YVETTE GUILBERT 

That was Yvette. The blithe Ambassadeurs 
GHtters, this Sunday of the Fete des Fleurs ; 
Here are the flowers, too, living flowers that blow 
A night or two before the odours go; 
And all the flowers of all the city ways 
Are laughing, with Yvette, this day of days. 
Laugh, with Yvette? But I must first forget 
Before I laugh, that I have heard Yvette. 
For the flowers fade before her ; see, the light 
Dies out of that poor cheek, and leaves it white; 
She sings of life, and mirth, and all that moves 
Man's fancy in the carnival of loves; 
And a chill shiver takes me as she sings 
The pity of unpitied human things, 
1894. 



89 



YVETTE GUILBERT 

She is tall, thin, a little angular, most 
winningly and girlishly awkward, as she 
wanders on to the stage with an air of vague 
distraction. Her shoulders droop, her arms 
hang limply. She doubles forward in an 
automatic bow in response to the thunders of 
applause, and that curious smile breaks out 
along her lips and rises and dances in her 
bright-blue eyes, wide open in a sort of 
child-like astonishment. Her hair, a bright 
auburn, rises in soft masses above a large 
pure forehead. She wears a trailing dress, 
striped yellow and pink, without ornamenta- 
tion. Her arms are covered with long black 
gloves. The applause stops suddenly; there 
is a hush of suspense; she is beginning to 
sing. 

And with the first note you realize the 
difference between Yvette Guilbert and all 
91 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



the rest of the world. A sonnet by Mr. 
Andre Raffalovich states just that difference 
so subtly that I must quote it to help out my 
interpretation : — 

If you want hearty laughter, country mirth — s 

Or frantic gestures of an acrobat, 
Heels over head — or floating lace skirts worth 

I know not what, a large eccentric hat 
And diamonds, the gift of some dull boy — 

Then when you see her do not wrong Yvette, 
Because Yvette is not a clever toy, 

A tawdry doll in fairy limelight set. 
And should her song sound cynical and base 

At first, herself ungainly, or her smile 
Monotonous — wait, listen, watch her face: 

The sufferings of those the world calls vile 
She sings, and as you watch Yvette Guilbert, 
You too will shiver, seeing their despair. 

Now to me Yvette Guilbert was exquisite 
from the first moment. "Exquisite!" I said 
under my breath, as I first saw her come 
upon the stage. She sang Sainte Galette, 
and as I listened to the song I felt a cold 
92 



YVETTE GUILBERT 



shiver run down my back, that frisson which 
no dramatic art, save that of Sarah Bern- 
hardt, had ever given me. I had heard about 
her, but it was not quite this that I was 
expecting, so poignant, so human, that I 
could scarcely endure the pity of it. It made 
me feel that I was wicked ; I, to have looked 
at these dreadfully serious things lightly. 
But it is not by her personal charm that she 
thrills you, and I admit that her personal 
charm could be called in question. It must be 
said, too, that she can do pure comedy — that 
she can be merely, deliciously gay. There is 
one of her songs in which she laughs, chuckles, 
and trills a rapid flurry of broken words 
and phrases, with the sudden, spontaneous, 
irresponsible mirth of a bird. But where 
she is most herself is in a manner of tragic 
comedy which has never been seen on the 
music-hall stage from the beginning. It is 
the profoundly sad and essentially serious 
comedy which one sees in Forain's marvel- 
93 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

lous designs — those rapid outlines which, 
with the turn of a pencil, give you the whole 
existence of those base sections of society 
which our art in England is mainly forced 
to ignore. People call the art of Forain 
immoral, they call Yvette Guilbert's songs 
immoral. That is merely the conventional 
misuse of a conventional word. The art of 
Yvette Guilbert is certainly the art of real- 
ism. She brings before you the real life 
drama of the streets, of the pot-house; she 
shows you the seamy side of life behind the 
scenes ; she calls things by their right names. 
But there is not a touch of sensuality about 
her, she is neither contaminated nor con- 
taminating by what she sings ; she is simply 
a great, impersonal, dramatic artist, who 
sings realism as others write it. 

In one of her songs, Sainte Galette, she 

represents a denizen of the Quartier Breda, 

praying in her room, at nightfall, to "Our 

Lady of Cash" — the great omnipotent 

94 



YVETTE GUILBERT 



"Sainte Galette." The verses are really 
powerful; the music, a sort of dirge or 
litany, is intensely pathetic. And as Yvette 
Guilbert sings, in her quiet, thrilling voice, 
which becomes harsher, for effect, in the 
lower notes, which becomes a moan, an ab- 
solute heart-breaking moan, in that recur- 
rent cry of "Sainte Galette," it is the note 
of sheer tragedy that she strikes. She 
literally shook me ; she made me shiver ; she 
brought tears to my eyes. In Je suis 
pocharde — where the words are more com- 
monplace — Yvette Guilbert brings into what 
might so easily be a merely vulgar repre- 
sentation of a drunken woman something of 
that tragic savour which gives artistic value 
as well as moral sanction to her most hazard- 
ous assumptions. Her gamut in the purely 
comic is wide; with an inflection of the voice, 
a bend of that curious long thin body which 
seems to be embodied gesture, she can sug- 
gest, she can portray, the humour that is 
95 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

dry, ironical, coarse (I will admit), unctuous 
even. Her voice can be sweet or harsh; it 
can chirp, lilt, chuckle, stutter; it can moan 
or laugh, be tipsy or distinguished. No- 
where is she conventional ; nowhere does she 
even resemble any other French singer. 
Voice, face, gestures, pantomime — all are 
different, all are purely her own. She is a 
creature of contrasts, and suggests at once 
all that is innocent and all that is perverse. 
She has the pure blue eyes of a child, eyes 
that are cloudless, that gleam with a wicked 
ingenuousness, that close in the utter abase- 
ment of weariness, that open wide in all the 
expressionlessness of surprise. Her naivete 
is perfect, and perfect, too, is that strange 
subtle smile of comprehension that closes 
the period. A great impersonal artist, de- 
pending as she does entirely on her expres- 
sive power, her dramatic capabilities, her 
gift for being moved, for rendering the emo- 
tions of those in whom we do not look for 

96 







'y^^^^^ ys...:^t^^^ 



Sketch of Yvette Guilbeet 



YVETTE GUILBERT 



just that kind of emotion, she affects one 
all the time as being, after all, removed from 
what she sings of — an artist whose sym- 
pathy is an instinct, a divination. There is 
something automatic in all fine histrionic 
genius, and I find some of the charm of the 
automaton in Yvette Guilbert. The real 
woman, one fancies, is the slim, bright-haired 
girl who looks so pleased and so amused 
when you applaud her, and whom it pleases 
to please you just because it is amusing. 
She could not tell you how she happens to 
be a great artist ; how she has found a voice 
for the tragic comedy of cities; how it is 
that she makes you cry when she sings of 
sordid miseries. "That is her secret/' we 
are accustomed to say ; and I like to imagine 
that it is a secret which she herself has never 
fathomed. 

The difference between Yvette Guilbert 
and every other singer on the variety stage 
is the difference between Sarah Bernhardt 
97 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



and every other actress. There are plenty 
of women who sing comic songs with talent : 
here is a woman who sings a new tragic 
variety of comedy and sings it with genius. 
The word "creation" has come to have a 
casual enough meaning in regard to any 
new performance on the stage, but in this 
case it is an epithet of simple justice. This 
new, subtle, tourmentee way of singing the 
miseries of the poor and the vices of the 
miserable is absolutely a creation; it brings 
at once a new order of subject and a 
novel manner of presentment into the comic 
repertoire, and it lifts the entertainment of 
the music-hall into a really high region of 
art. To hear her sing six songs, all quite 
diiferent in tone — La Petite Curieuse, 
La Terre, Beranger's Lisette, Morphinee, 
Les Demoiselles a Marier, and Qa fait 
toujours plaisir, is to realise how wide 
her range is. One song, for instance, 
La Terre, which is serious to the point 

98 



YVETTE GUILBERT 



of solemnity, and in which the whole effect 
consists in the deep feeling and the delicately 
varied intonation given to the refrain at 
every recurrence, gave me much more 
pleasure than Beranger's Lisette, the 
"grisette de quinze ans." Morphinee is 
sheer tragedy; it is a song by that clever, 
eccentric, never quite satisfactory person, 
Jean Lorrain, and it tells all the horror of 
a life enslaved by morphine. Words and 
music are singularly apt and mutually ex- 
pressive, and the rise of the voice, into a 
sort of dull, yet intense monotony, at the 
words "je suis hallucinee," is one of the 
most thrilling effects that even Yvette has 
ever obtained. The whole thing — sordid, 
horrible, crazed, as it is — is, as a piece of 
acting, incomparably expressive, and it is 
always restrained within the severest artistic 
limits. La Petite Curieuse and fd fait 
toujours plaisir are more conventional, as 
songs; slight, neatly done, quite finished in 
99 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



their way, and with some of that perverse 
naivete which was, I believe, Yvette Guil- 
bert's earliest discovery in method. Les 
Demoiselles a Marier, the most cynical and 
subtle of her studies in the young lady of 
the period, carries this method to a far finer 
perfection. In what it says and what it sug- 
gests it is excessively piquant: really witty, 
with a distinctively French wit, it has all the 
fine malice of Les Demoiselles de Pen- 
sionat, and an even finer, because a more 
varied, expressiveness. It is in this ex- 
pressiveness that the secret of Yvette Guil- 
bert lies, and the secret of the expressive- 
ness is, partly, a conscientious attention to 
detail. Other people are content with mak- 
ing an effect, say, twice in the course of a 
song. Yvette insists on getting the full 
meaning out of every line, and, with her, to 
grasp a meaning is to have found an effect. 
It is genius, which must be born, not made ; 
and it is also that "infinite capacity for tak- 

lOO 



YVETTE GUILBERT 



ing pains." I remember her saying to me, 
"Other women are just as clever as I am, 
but if I make up my mind that I will do a 
thing I always do it. I try, and try, and 
try, until I succeed." There the true artist 
spoke, and the quality I claim for Yvette 
Guilbert, above all other qualities, is that 
she is a true artist, an artist as genuine, and 
in her own way as great, as any actress on 
any stage. 
1900. 



lOI 



DANCERS AND DANCING 



LA MELINITE: MOULIN-ROUGE. 

Olivier Metra's Waltz of Roses 
Sheds in a rhythmic shower 
The very petals of the flower; 
And all is roses, 
The rouge of petals in a shower. 

Down the long hall the dance returning 

Rounds the full circle, rounds 

The perfect rose of lights and sounds. 

The rose returning 

Into the circle of its rounds. 

Alone, apart, one dancer watches 
Her mirrored, morbid grace ; 
Before the mirror, face to face, 
Alone she watches 
Her morbid, vague, ambiguous grace. 

Before the mirror's dance of shadows 

She dances in a dream. 

And she and they together seem 

A dance of shadows. 

Alike the shadows of a dream. 

105 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



The orange-rosy lamps are trembling 

Between the robes that turn; 

In ruddy flowers of flame that bum 

The lights are trembling: 

.The shadows and the dancers turn. 

And, enigmatically smiling, 
In the mysterious night. 
She dances for her own delight, 
A shadow smiling 
Back to a shadow in the night, 
1892. 



io5 



DANCERS AND DANCING 



It was in May, 1892, that, having crossed 
the streets of Paris from the hotel where I 
was staying, the Hotel Corneille, in the Latin 
Quarter (made famous by Balzac in his 
superb story, Z. Marcas), I found myself 
in Le Jardin de Paris where I saw for the 
first time La Melinite. She danced in a 
quadrille: young and girlish, the more pro- 
vocative because she played as a prude, 
with an assumed modesty; dicolletSe nearly 
to the waist, in the Oriental fashion. She 
had long black curls around her face; and 
had about her a depraved virginity. 

And she caused in me, even then, a curious 

sense of depravity that perhaps comes into 

the verses I wrote on her. There, certainly, 

on the night of May 22d, danced in her 

107 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

feverish, her perverse, her enigmatical 
beauty, La MeUnite, to her own image in the 
mirror : 

"A shadow smiling 
Back to a shadow in the night": 

as she cadenced Olivier Metra's Valse des 
Roses. 

The chahut, which she danced, is the suc- 
cessor, one might almost say the renaissance, 
of the cancan. Roughly speaking, the can- 
can died with the Bal Mabille, the chahut 
was born with the Jardin de Paris. The 
effervescent Bal Bullier of the Quartier 
Latin, in its change from the Closerie des 
Lilas, of the days of Murger, may be said 
to have kept the tradition of the thing, and, 
with the joyous and dilapidated Moulin de 
la Galette of the heights of Montmartre, to 
have led the way in the establishment of 
the present school of dancing. But it was 
at the Jardin de Paris, about the year 1884, 
108 




Folies-Bergere Poster 



DANCERS AND DANCING 



that the chahuf, or the quadrille natural- 
iste, made its appearance, and, with La 
Goulue and Grille-d'figout, came to stay. 
The dance is simply a quadrille in delirium 
— a quadrille in which the steps are punctu- 
ated by le port dfarmes (or high kicks), 
with le grand ecart (or "the splits") for 
parenthesis. Le port d'armes is done by 
standing on one foot and holding the other 
upright in the air; le grand ecart by sitting 
on the floor with the legs absolutely hori- 
zontal. Beyond these two fundamental rules 
of the game, everything almost is left to the 
fantasy of the performer, and the fantasy 
of the whirling people of the Moulin Rouge, 
the Casino, the Jardin de Paris, the Elysee 
Montmartre, is free, fertile, and peculiar. 
Even in Paris you must be somewhat ultra- 
modern to appreciate it, and to join, night 
after night, those avid circles which form 
so rapidly, here and there on the ball-room 
floor, as a waltz-rhythm ends, and a placard 
109 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



bearing the word "Quadrille" is hung out 
from the musicians' gallery. 

Of all the stars of the chahut, the most 
charming, the most pleasing, is La Goulue. 
Still young, though she has been a choreo- 
graphic celebrity for seven or eight years; 
still fresh, a veritable "queen of curds and 
cream" among the too white and the too red 
women of the Moulin Rouge; she has that 
simple, ingenuous air which is, perhaps, the 
last refinement, to the perverse, of per- 
versity. To dance the chahut, to dance it 
with infinite excitement, and to look like a 
milkmaid: that, surely, is a triumph of 
natural genius! Grill e-d'Egout, her com- 
panion and rival, is not so interesting. She 
is dark, serious, correct, perfectly accom- 
plished in her art, and a professor of it, but 
she has not the high spirits, the entrain, the 
attractiveness, of La Goulue. In Nini- 
Patte-en-l'Air, a later, though an older, 
leader of the quadrille naturaliste, and, like 
no 



DANCERS AND DANCING 



Grille-d'figout, a teacher of eccentric danc- 
ing, we find, perhaps, the most typical repre- 
sentative of the chahut of to-day. She is 
not young, she is not pretty, she is thin, 
short of stature, dark, with heavy eyebrows, 
coarse, irregular features. Her face is worn 
and haggard, almost ghastly; her mouth is 
drawn into an acute, ambiguous, ironical 
smile ; her roving eyes have a curious, intent 
glitter. She has none of the gaminerie of 
La Goulue: hers is a severely self-conscious 
art, and all her extravagances are perfectly 
deliberate. But with what mastery they are 
done, with what tireless agility, what tire- 
less ingenuity in invention! Always cold, 
collected, "the Maenad of the Decadence," 
it is with a sort of "learned fury" that she 
dances; and she has a particular trick — the 
origin of her nickname — a particular quiver 
of the foot as the leg is held rigid in the 
air — which is her sign and signature. After 
these three distinguished people come many. 
Ill 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



There is La Melinite, Rayon-d'Or, La 
Sauterelle, Etoile Filante, and many another ; 
of whom La Melinite is certainly the most 
interesting. She is tall, slim, boyish in 
figure, decolletee in the Eastern fashion, in 
a long slit; she dances with a dreamy ab- 
sorption, a conventional air, as of perverted 
sanctity, remote, ambiguous. And then 
there is La Macarona of the Elysee-Mont- 
martre, whose sole title to distinction lies in 
the extraordinary effrontery of her costume. 



II 



On my way to Nini-Patte-en-l*Air*s I 
stopped at a second-hand bookstall, where 
I purchased a particular edition which I had 
long been seeking, of a certain edifying work 
of great repute. Opening the book at ran- 
dom, I found myself at Chapter XX., De 
Amore Solitudinis et Silenti. "Relinque 

112 



DANCERS AND DANCING 



curiosa," I read. Then I put the book in 
my pocket and went on to Nini-Patte-en- 
I'Air^s. 

Of course, I had been at the Trafalgar 
Square Theatre — two Saturdays ago, was it 
not? — when the unaccountable British pub- 
lic had applauded so frankly and so vigor- 
ously its first glimpse of a quadplle natural- 
iste in England. But now I was going, 
in response to a special invitation from 
Madame Nini, to see what I fancied would 
interest me far more, a private lesson in the 
art of the chahut. I found the hotel, but 
not, at first, the front door. In the bar no 
one knew of a front door, but I might go 
upstairs, they said, if I liked: that way, 
through the door on the right. I went up- 
stairs, found a waiter, and presently Nini- 
Patte-en-rAir bustled into the room, and 
told me to make myself quite at home. Nini 
is charming, with her intense nervous vi- 
vacity, her quaint seriousness, her little 
113 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



professional airs; befitting the directress of 
the sole ecole du chahut at present existing 
in the world. We have all seen her on th-e 
stage, and the little, plain, thick-set woman 
with the vivid eyes and the enigmatic mouth, 
is just the same on the stage and off. She 
is the same because she has an individuality 
of her own, which gives her, in her own kind 
of dancing, a place apart — an individuality 
which is reinforced by a degree of accom- 
plishment to which neither La Goulue nor 
Grille-d'figout, neither La Sauterelle nor 
Rayon-d'Or, can for a moment pretend. 
And I found that she takes herself very 
seriously; that she is justly proud of being 
the only chahut dancer who has made an art 
out of a caprice, as well as the only one who 
has conquered all the difficulties of her own 
making, the only executant at once faultless 
and brilliant. We talked of many things, I 
of Paris and she of London, for which she 
professes an immense enthusiasm; then she 
114 



DANCERS AND DANCING 



told me of her triumphant tour in America, 
and how she conquered America by the 
subtle discretion of her dessous, which were 
black. Blue, pink, yellow, white, she experi- 
mented with all colours; but the American 
standpoint was only precisely found and 
flattered by the factitious reserve of black. 
Then, as she explained to me all the tech- 
nique of her art, she would jump up from 
the armchair in which she was sitting, shoot 
a sudden leg, surprisingly, into the air, and 
do the grand ecart on the hearthrug. But 
the pupils? Oh, the pupils were coming; 
and Madame and I had just finished moving 
the heavy oak table into a corner, when the 
door opened, and they came in. 

I was introduced, firstly, to La Tene- 
breuse, a big woman of long experience, 
whom I found to be more supple than her 
figure indicated. ;6glantine came next, a 
tall, strong, handsome, dignified-looking girl, 
with dark eyes and eyebrows; she is in her 
115 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



second year, and has been with Nini in 
America. Then came :&pi-d'Or, a timid, yet 
gay, rather EngHsh little blonde, who makes 
her debut in London. They sat down 
meekly, like good little school-girls, and each 
came forward as she was called, went 
through her exercises, and returned to her 
seat by the door. And those exercises! It 
was not a large room, and when a tall girl 
lay at full length on the floor, and Nini bent 
over her, seized one of her legs, and worked 
it about as if it were a piece of india-rubber, 
the space seemed quite sufficiently occupied. 
When ;figlantine took her third step towards 
me, kicking her hand on the level of her 
eyes at each step, I tried to push back my 
chair a little closer to the wall, in case of 
accidents; and the big girl. La Tenebreuse, 
when she did the culbute, or somersault, 
ending with the grand ecart, or the splits, 
finished at, almost on, my feet. I saw the 
preparatory exercises, le hrisemeiit, or dis- 
ii6 



DANCERS AND DANCING 



location, and la serie, or the high-kick, done 
by two in concert; and then the different 
poses of the actual dance itself: la guitare, 
in which the leg is held almost at right 
angles with the body, the ankle supported 
by one hand; le port d'armes, in which the 
leg is held upright, one hand clasping the 
heel of the boot — a position of great diffi- 
culty, on which le salut militaire is a slight 
variation; la Jamhe derriere la tete, a posi- 
tion which requires the most elaborate acro- 
batic training, and which is perhaps as pain- 
ful to see as it must be to do ; le croisemenf, 
which ends a figure and is done by two or 
four dancers, forming a sort of cross-pat- 
tern by holding their heels together in the 
air, on a level with the eyes; and le grand 
ecart, or the splits, which is done either by 
gliding gradually out (the usual method), 
or by a sudden jump in which the split is 
done in the air, and the body falls violently 
to the ground, like a pair of compasses which 
117 



i COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

have opened out by their own weight. It 
was all very instructive, very curious, very 
amusing. "Relinque curiosa," said the book 
in my pocket. But I was far from being 
in that monastic mood as I watched these 
extraordinary contortions, done so blithely, 
yet so seriously, by Tenebreuse, ]&glantine, 
and fipi-d'Or; Nini-Pattee-en-l'Air giving 
her orders with that professional air now 
more fixed than ever on her attentive face. 
It was all so discreet, after a fashion, in its 
methodical order; so comically indiscreet, in 
another sense. I am avid of impressions 
and sensations; and here, certainly, was a 
new sensation, an impression of something 
not easily to be seen elsewhere. I sat and 
pondered, my chair pushed close back to the 
wall, Nini-Patte-en-l'Air by my side, and be- 
fore me Tenebreuse, %lantine, and %i- 
d'Or. 
, 1897. 



ii§ 



LEON BLOY: 
THE THANKLESS BEGGAR 



LEON BLOY: THE THANKLESS 
BEGGAR 

The writer whom Octave Mirabeau has 
called le plus somptueux ecrivain de notre 
temps, of whom Remy de Gourmont has said 
that he is un de plus grands createurs 
d'images que la terre ait partes, is indeed 
"himself remarkable." In Le Mendiant In- 
grat, a journal kept during the years 1892- 
1895, which forms a sort of autobiography, 
he writes: "J'ai vecu, sans vergogne, dans 
une extreme solitude, peuplee des ressenti- 
ments et des desirs fauves que mon e:5i:ecra- 
tion des contemporains enfantait, ecrivant ou 
vociferant ce qui me paraissait juste. ]&cri- 
vant ou vociferant," for the writing of this 
strange pamphleteer of genius is at times an 
almost inarticulate cry of rage or of disgust. 
"Je suis Tenclume au fond du gouffre," he 
121 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

cries, in a letter to Henry de Groux, written 
at a time when his wife, believed to be at the 
point of death, had received extreme unc- 
tion, "I'enclume de Dieu, qui me fait souffrir 
ainsi parce qu'il m'aime, je le sais bien. 
L'enclume de Dieu, au fond du gouffre! 
Soit. C'est une bonne place pour retentir vers 
Lui." In the dedication of his new book 
he invites a friend to make his escape "des 
Lieux Communs ou Ton dine pour venir 
heroiquement ronger avec moi des cranes 
d'imbeciles dans la solitude." It is a dish on 
which he has sharpened his teeth all his life, 
and his hunger is deadly. Bloy tells us that 
he lives entirely on alms, and he affirms that 
it is the duty of man toward man, and espe- 
cially of Christian toward Christian, to 
supply the need of one whose poverty is hon- 
ourable. "Pourquoi voudrait-on que je ne 
m'honorasse pas d'avoir ete un mendiant, et, 
surtout, un 'mendiant ingrat ?' " His journal 
is the journal of Lazarus at the gate, lifting 

122 



LEON bloy: the thankless beggar 

up his voice against the rich man who has 
thrown him the crumbs from his table. 
Here is no anarchism, no poHtical or social 
grievance ; it is the outcry of a Catholic and 
an aristocrat of letters, unable to "make his 
way in the world," because he will not "pros- 
titute himself" to any servile or lying tasks. 
Has a man the right to claim his right to 
live, and to claim it without shame, and 
without gratitude to the giver for more than 
the spirit of the gift? That is the problem 
which Bloy sets before us. Bloy is a fervent 
Catholic, he believes in God, he believes that 
the promises of the Bible are to be taken 
literally, and that, literally, "the Lord will 
provide" for his servants. Man, in alms- 
giving, is but the instrument, often the un- 
willing instrument, of God ; Bloy is therefore 
ready to receive help from his enemies and 
to bastonade his friends, in perfect good 
faith. "I recognise a friend," he says 
simply, "by his giving me money." He is 
123 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



the living statement of the dependence of 
man on man, that is, of man on God, who 
can act only through man. Where he is 
alone is in his pride in that humiliation of 
himself, and in his insistence on the duty 
of others to give him what he is in need of. 
The most eloquent of his pleadings against 
the world's commonplaces is No. CXLIV, 
Avoir du pain sur la planche. Quand il n'y 
en a que quelques miettes, he says, ga se 
mange encore. Quand il y en a trop, ga ne 
se mange pas du tout, ga devient des pierres 
et c'est avec le pain sur la planche des bour- 
geois de Jerusalem que fut lapide le proto- 
martyr. 

But it is not merely in his quality of man 
and of Christian that Bloy demands alms, it 
is as the prophet and familiar friend of 
God. I do not doubt Bloy's sincerity in be- 
lieving that he has a "message" to the world. 
His message, he tells us, is de notifier la 
gloire de Dieu, and it is to notify the glory 
124 



LEON bloy: the thankless beggar 

I 

of God by spoiling the Egyptians, scourging 
the money changers out of the Temple, and 
otherwise helping to cleanse the gutters of 
creation. It is his mission to be a scavenger, 
and to spare the cesspool of a friend who 
might be useful, or the dunghill of an em- 
ployer who has been useful, materially, 
would be an act almost criminal. With this 
conviction in his soul, with a flaming and 
devouring temperament which must prey on, 
something if it is not to prey mortally on 
itself, it is not unnatural that he has never 
been able to "write for money." The artist 
may indeed write for money, with only 
comparative harm to himself or to his art. 
He permits himself to do something which 
he accounts of secondary importance. But 
the prophet, who is a voice, must always cry 
his message ; to change a syllable of his mes- 
sage is to sin the unpardonable sin. With 
him whatever is not absolute truth, truth to 
conviction, is a wilful lie. 
125 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



Bloy's Exegese des Lieiix Communs is a 
crucifixion of the bourgeois on a cross of 
the bourgeois' own making. Now it is to 
the bourgeois, after all, that Bloy appeals for 
alms, and it is from the bourgeois that he 
receives it, as he declares (and, indeed, 
proves) "thanklessly." I am not sure that 
the conventional estimation ol gratitude as 
one of the main virtues, of gratitude in all 
circumstances and for all favours received, 
has not a profoundly bourgeois origin. I 
have never been able clearly to recognise the 
necessity, or even the possibility, of grati- 
tude towards anyone for whom I have not 
a feeling of personal affection, quite apart 
from any exchange of benefits. The con- 
ferring what is called a favour, materially, 
and the prompt return of a delicate senti- 
ment, gratitude, seems to me a kind of com- 
mercialism of the mind, a mere business 
transaction, in which an honest exchange is 
not always either possible or needful. The 
126 



LEON bloy: the thankless beggar : 

demand for gratitude In return for a gift 
comes largely from the respect which most 
people have for money; from the idea that 
money is the most "serious" thing in the 
world, instead of an accident, a compromise, 
the symbol of a physical necessity, but a 
thing having no real existence in itself, no 
real importance to the mind which refuses 
to realise its existence. Only the miser 
really possesses it in itself, in any significant 
way; for the miser is an idealist, the poet 
of gold. To all others it is a kind of mathe- 
matics, and a synonym for being "re- 
spected." You may say it is necessary, al- 
most as necessary as breathing, and I will 
not deny it. Only I will deny that a,nyone 
can be actively grateful for the power of 
breathing. He cannot conceive of himself 
without that power. To conceive of oneself 
without money, that is to say without the 
means of going on living, is at once to con- 
ceive of the right, the mere human right, 
127 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

to assistance. If, in addition to that mere 
human right, one is convinced that one is a 
man of genius, the right becomes more 
plainly evident, and if, in addition, one has 
a divine "message" for the world, what 
further need be said ? That, I take it, is the 
argument of Bloy's conviction. It is a prob- 
lem which I should like to set before Tolstoi. 
I am not sure that the meekest and the most 
arrogant enemy of our civilisation would not 
join hands, Tolstoi's with a gift in it, of- 
fered freely and humbly, which Bloy's would 
take, freely and proudly. 
1902., 



128 



VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS 



VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS 

The centenary of Hugo gives this collec- 
tion a special interest as the last thing from 
the hand of the master whose astonishing 
literary career began in 1816. On one of 
the pages of the Post-scriptum de ma Vie 
he writes: Mais les fondateurs de religions 
ont erre, Vanalogie n'est pas toujours la 
logique. The whole of this book is a vast 
exercise in analogies. It comes to us as with 
the voice of a new revelation; it neither 
proves nor denies, nor does it even argue; 
from beginning to end it affirms. And the 
affirmations range over the universe. L'in- 
telligence est Vepouse, Vimagination est la 
maitresse, la memoire est la servante. 
There, on the side of a witty common sense, 
is one affirmation. Here, in the language 
of an apocalyptic mysticism, is another: 
Et c'est toujours de Vimmanent, toujours 
,131 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 




Victor Hugo as a Young Man 



132 



VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS 



present, toujours tangible, toujours inex- 
plicable, foujours inconcevable, toujours in- 
contestable, que sort I'agenouillement hu- 
main. There are 270 pages of the most 
eloquent images in the world — images which 
seem to bubble out of the brain like unin- 
habitable worlds out of the creating hands 
of a mad deity. Every image detaches itself 
gaily, floats away with supreme confidence 
into space; and perhaps arrives somewhere: 
certainly it soon becomes invisible. Mon- 
mouth and Macedon are at one for ever in 
these astonishing pages ; every desire of the 
heart seems to fulfil itself by its mere utter- ' 
ance; there is no longer a truism: ABC 
have become miraculous again, as they were 
in the beginning. Qu'est-ce que Voceanf 
Cest une permission. When the ocean is a 
permission, birds may fly where they please. 
And these little, hard, sharp sentences are 
scattered violently in all directions ; they rise 
like fireworks, they fall like comets, lighting 
133 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

'up patches of impenetrable darkness. They 
succeed one another so rapidly that the eyes 
can scarcely follow them; and each leaves 
behind it the same blackness. 

When Victor Hugo thought that he was 
thinking, he was really listening to the in- 
articulate murmur that words make among 
themselves as they await the compelling 
hand of their master. He was master of 
them all, and they adored him, and they 
served him so willingly and so swiftly that 
[he never needed to pause and choose among 
ithem, or think twice on what errand he 
should send them. They had started on 
their errand before he had finished the mes- 
sage he had to give them. 

Par le ciel, dont la mort est le noir machiniste, 
Le sage sur le sort s'accoude, calme et triste, 
Content d'un peu de pain et d'une goutte d'eau, 
Et, pensif, il attend le lever du rideau. 

Is not this epigram rather than poetry, in- 
genuity rather than imagination? Does it 
134 



VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS 



not show, in the words of M. de Regnier, 
a little of le gigantesque effort du prosateur 
qui boite d'une antithese fatigantef Or 
take this line, 

La vie est un torchon orne d'une dentelle, 

which it has seemed worth giving by itself 
among the Tas de Pierres, a line certainly 
characteristic of Hugo : can one accept it as 
a line of poetry, or is it not rather, like the 
whole passage which we have quoted, an 
effort of mere prose logic? Poem follows 
poem, sonorous, ingenious, exterior, made 
for the most part out of a commonplace 
which puffs itself out to a vast size. They 
are like clusters of glittering images round 
the faint light of a tiny idea. One cannot 
read them without admiration for their 
astonishing cleverness; still one cannot feel 
anything but cold admiration, without either 
interest or sympathy. They are the mathe- 
matical piling up of a given structure, in 
135 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



a given way, always the same. Poem re- 
peats poem like an echo; always the same 
admirable form, finished to a kind of hard 
clear surface, off which the mind slips, with- 
out penetrating it. It is really difficult to 
read a poem like Soir d'Avril, for instance, 
with its facile forty-five stanzas, so apt, so 
eloquent, so elegant, so generalized, in which 
so many pretty things are said about love, 
but in which love never speaks with its own 
voice. All these resonant poems about Babel, 
and hell, and le grand Eire contain splen- 
did images, and rise into a fine oratory; but 
they come to us like the voice of a crowd, 
not the voice of a man. 

Among the fragments in these pages are 
some epigrams of a Latin sharpness and 
savour. Take this one, A un Critique: — 

Un aveugle a le tact tres fin, tres net, tres clair; 
Autant que le renard des bois, il a le flair ; 
Autant que le chamois des monts, il a Touie ; 
Sa sensibilite, rare, exquise, inouie, 
136 






% . . . '■ / / * ■-;■»•'■ 

4^ 5Ki^ <^'^'*«> 



?^* 5--*^ <7T?^^c? 



Facsimile of Letter from Victor Hugo 



VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS 



Du moindre vent couHs lui fait un coup de poing; 

Son oreille est subtile et delicate au point 

Que lorsque un oiseau chante, il croit qu'un taureau 

beugle. 
Quel flair! quel tact! quel goiit! — Oui, mais il est 

aveugle. 

There, in that merely logical development 
of an idea, in that strictly calculated progres- 
sion, you will find the method which really 
lies hidden in most of the more eloquent, 
the more obviously poetical, passages in this 
volume. A poem which impresses by its 
largeness and loftiness, Du Haut des Mon- 
tagues, is poetical, if one looks into it, only 
in its choice of detail; the "mental cartoon- 
ing" is inadequate, mechanical. It begins : — 

Voici les Apennins, les Alpes et les Andes, 
Tais-toi, passant, devant ces visions si grandes. 
Silence, homrae! histrion! Les monts contemplent 
Dieu. 

Then comes a powerful and vivid statement 
of 

137 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

Le drame formidable et sombre de Tabime, 
L'entree et la sortie etrange de la nuit, 

of which the mountains are the spectators; 
then the reflection : — 

Pour eux, Thomme n'est pas, un peuple s'evapore; 

finally, a geographical conclusion: — 

Balkan, sans voir Stamboul, chante son noir salem; 
Sina voit I'infini, mais non Jerusalem. 

Is there not in all this something a little 
obvious, a little made up ? Is it not an effect 
of rhetoric rather than an authentic vision? 
That the authentic vision can be found in 
Hugo when Hugo is his finest self, we all 
know; but in how much of his work, as in 
the whole, or almost the whole, of this last 
volume of it, we find that fundamentally in- 
sincere rhetoric which is none the less insin- 
cere because it is thundered from the hilltop ! 
The testament of Victor Hugo, Post- 
138 



VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS 



scriptum de ma Vie, is after all not the last 
publication of a writer whose energy seems 
to survive death. Here is Derniere Gerbe, 
the last sheaf, a collection of poems, of which 
the earliest dates from 1829. For the most 
part the poems are complete, but there is a 
small collection of fragments, called Tas de 
PierreSy single lines, couplets and stanzas; 
and at the end of the volume are some dis- 
connected scenes and speeches from one or 
two unfinished plays, Une Aventure de Don 
Cesar, Maglia, Gavoulagoule. 

The poems contained in this volume are 
all characteristic of Hugo, but not charac- 
teristic of Hugo at his best. Take, for ex- 
ample, Le Rideau: — 

Ce monde, fete ou deuil, palais ou galetas, 
Est chimerique, faux, ondoyant, plein d'un tas 
De spectres vains, qu'on nomme Amour, Orgueil, 

Envie. 
L'immense ciel bleu pend, tire sur I'autre vie. 
Le vrai drame, ou deja nos coeurs sont rattaches, 
Les personnages, vrais, helas! nous sont caches. 

139 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



It did not matter; there were always more 
words, and more and more, ready to do his 
bidding. Listen : — 

Pourquoi Virgile est-il inferieur a Ho- 
mere? Pourquoi Anacreon est-il inferieur a 
Pindar ef Pourquoi Menandre est-il inferieur 
a Aristophanef Pourquoi Sophocle est-il 
inferieur a Eschylef Pourquoi Lysippe est- 
il inferieur a Phidias? Pourquoi David 
est-il inferieur a Isaie?., Pourquoi Thucyd- 
ide est-il inferieur a Herodote? Pourquoi 
Ciceron est-il inferieur a Demosthene? 

There are eight more similar queries, and 
there the series ends, but there is no reason 
why it should ever have ended. 

"The primitive and myth-making char- 
acter of his imagination," says Mr. Have- 
lock Ellis, "the tendency to regard meta- 
phors as real, and to accept them as the 
basis of his mental constructions and doc- 
trines, these tendencies, which Hugo shared 
with the savage, are dependent on rudi- 
140 



VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS 



mentary emotions and a high degree of ig- 
norance regarding the precise relationship 
of things." 

, Which he shared with the savage, yes, 
with that primitive being which is at the 
root of every great poet. The poet who 
is also a philosopher loses nothing as a 
poet ; he adds meaning to beauty. But there 
is also the poet to whom the vast joy of 
making is sufficient, who has no curiosity 
concerning the work of his hands; who 
makes beauty, and leaves it to others to ex- 
plain it. "Le beau, c'est la forme," declares 
Hugo. "La forme est essentielle et absolue ; 
elle vient des entrailles memes de I'idee." 
To work, with Hugo, was almost an auto- 
matic process; an enormous somnambulism 
carried his soul about the world of imagina- 
tion. Read the Promontorium Somnii in 
this testament; it is a picture in fifty pages, 
and each sentence is a separate picture. 
Ideas? ideas come and go, drift away and 
141 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



return; visible and audible ideas helping to 
make the colours of the picture. 

There is beauty in this book, as in every- 
thing that Hugo wrote; there is the great 
poetic orator's mastery of language. Hugo's 
poetry was never made to be "overheard"; 
his prose knocks hard at the ear for instant 
hearing. Even when he dreams, he dreams 
oratorically ; he would have you realise that 
he is asleep on Patmos. He has strange 
glimpses. Le spectre hlanc coud des manches 
a son suaire et devient Pierrot. Quant a la 
quantite de comedie qui peut se meter au 
reve, qui ne Va eprouvef On rit endormi. 

Little passing thoughts, each an analogy, 
leap out: Vecho est la rime de la nature. 
Ce qui fait que la musique plait tant au 
commun des hommes, c*est que c'est de la 
reverie toute faite. 

Every sentence contains an antithesis or 
forms an epigram. All is clamour, clangour, 
and the voice of "loud uplifted angel- 
142 



VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS 



trumpets." When it is ended, and one looks 
back, it is as if one tried to recall the shapes 
and colours of an avalanche of clouds seen 
by night over a wide and tossing sea. 
1902. 



143 



A TRAGIC COMEDY 



A TRAGIC COMEDY 

In one of the letters now published in 
their complete form for the first time, Al- 
fred de Musset writes : — "La posterite repe- 
tera nos noms comme ceux de ces amants 
immortels qui n*en ont plus qu'un a eux 
deux, comme Romeo et Juliette, comme 
Heloise et Abelard. On ne parlera jamais 
de I'un sans parler de Tautre." It is true 
that the name of George Sand instinc- 
tively calls up the name of Alfred de Mus- 
set, and that his name instinctively calls 
up hers. But does posterity really repeat 
the names of "the lovers of Venice" in the 
same spirit as it repeats the names of the 
lovers of Verona, or even as it repeats the 
name of "the learned nun" and her lover? 
A third name asks to be admitted into the 
company; posterity queries, "And Pagello?" 

This is a question on which the last word 
147 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



will probably never be said; but the most 
important documents in the case, certainly, 
are those which have now been published in 
as entire a condition as George Sand's care- 
ful scissors left them. They were pre- 
served by her, it is clear, as a justification 
of herself; and there is no doubt that they 
justified her in her own eyes. It is still 
possible to read them through, and, while 
admitting the troubles that she had to suffer 
from a spoilt child like Musset, to sympa- 
thise, if not actually to take sides, with 
Musset rather than with her. Musset's let- 
ters, with all their extravagance, sentimen- 
tality, literary affectations, petulances, fits 
and starts of feeling, hysteria even, are the 
letters of a man who is really in love, who 
really suffers acutely. George Sand's letters 
are maternal, affectionate, reasonable, sooth- 
ing, at times worried into a little energy 
of feeling; but they are the letters of a 
woman who has never really loved the man 
148 



A TRAGIC COMEDY 



whom she has left for another. "Tu as 
vingt-trois ans, et voila que j'en ai trente- 
et-un," she says, in one of the last of them; 
and there, certainly, is the explanation of 
much. In one of the first letters after 
Musset's flight from Venice, he writes to 
her: "Tu t'etais trompee; tu fes crue ma 
maitresse, tu n'etais que ma mere;" and she 
answers, "Peuimporte!" She calls him "Mon 
petit f rere, mon enfant," and cries, "Ah ! qui 
te soignera et qui soignerai-je? Qui aura 
besoin de moi et de qui voudrai-je prendre 
soin desormais?" The real woman speaks 
there, and, coming when it does in the story, 
it is not the word of a lover. It expresses 
the need of an organisation, the besoin de 
nourrir cetfe maternelle sollicititde qui s'est 
habituee a veiller sur im etre souffrant et 
fatigue. Between this instinct of compas- 
sion and the impulse of love there is a great 
gulf. It is an instinct that may be heroism 
in a woman who renounces love for its sake. 
149 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS I' 

But a very harsh kind of comedy steps in 
when the woman writes of her present lover 
to her former lover : "J^ Taimais comme un 
pere, et tu etais notre enfant a tous deux." 

It is true that Musset, genuine as his let- 
ters seem to be in their expression of a real 
feeling, is not always absorbed in it to the 
exclusion of other interests. A month after 
he has left Venice, in the midst of a troubled 
and very serious letter, he says suddenly : — 

Je m'en vais faire un roman. J'ai hien envie 
d'ecrire notre histoire: il me semble que cela me 
guerirait et m'eleverait le cosur. 

He asks her permission which she gives 
readily; she is writing something else, not 
about herself or him at all, a part of her 
undeviating course of work, which flows 
onward, then and always, without change 
of direction, or in any direction. While he 
reads Werther and meditates the Confession 
d'un Enfant du Steele, a book certainly 
150 



A TRAGIC COMEDY 



made out of the best of his heart and the 
most honest part of his senses, she is ask- 
ing him to correct her proofs for the Revue 
des Deux Mondes, and to insert the chapter- 
divisions, which she is afraid in her haste 
she has forgotten. Later in the book the 
letters become more exciting. They meet 
again, and Musset forgets everything but 
his love. The letter from Baden is an out- 
cry almost of agony. The words gasp and 
rush: Je suis perdu, vois-tu, je suis noye, 
inonde d' amour; je ne sais plus si je vis, si 
je mange, si je marche, si je respire, si je 
park; je sais que j'aime. Je t'aime, ma 
chair. Pagello is no longer between them, 
but there is something, as before, between 
them; she tries to love him again, seems 
about to succeed, and then there is the new, 
inevitable parting with which these letters 
end. In some of the brief last letters she, 
too, seems to suffer, and the distressing rea- 
sonableness of tone gives way to a less 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

guarded emphasis. But she recovers her- 
self, and with the cry of, Mes enfans, mes 
en fans! leaves him. 

Such value as the episode may have had 
to the rarer genius of the two is to be found, 
perhaps, in the phrase of Musset, true most 
likely: Sois fiere, mon grand et brave 
George, tu as fait un homme d'un enfant. 
The amount of "self -improvement" derived 
by George Sand from the same experience 
is a more negligible quantity. Musset at 
least was to write a few songs and a few 
comedies which were worth any "expense 
of spirit'* whatever; and if George Sand 
helped to make him the man who was ca- 
pable of writing these, she did well. Her 
own sentimental education could probably 
have done without Musset easily enough; 
we might have had one Elle et Lui the less, 
but we should have had one Liicresia 
Floriani the more. Musset or Pagello, 
Chopin or Pierre Leroux, it mattered little 

152 



A TRAGIC COMEDY 



to her; each added an appreciable interest 
to her life, and an appreciable volume or so 
to her work. But of no man could it be 
said that he had been needful to her, that 
he had helped to make her what she was. 
She went through life taking what she 
wanted, and she ended her days in calm 
self-content, the most famous of contempo- 
rary women. It is possible that in the 
future she will be remembered chiefly as the 
friend or enemy of some of the greatest men 
of her time. 
1904. 



153 



PETRUS BOREL 



PETRUS BOREL 

The name of Petrus Borel has come to 
be a laughing-stock to the Phihstine, a by- 
word to the Bourgeois. His nick-name, "le 
lycanthrope," is remembered, but it is for- 
gotten that it was of his own christening. 
What Gautier said of him as a friend, and 
Baudelaire as a critic; all that and the fact 
that he was the chief of a cenacle and "un 
roi qui s'en allait," all but a few seekers 
after lost reputations have forgotten. He 
is a figure fantastic but not grotesque, a 
defier of order but a slave of letters. He 
dreamed of conquering the world. He was 
a dandy, whether with a "gilet a la Robes- 
pierre" or naked under a tiger-skin. His 
whole work, scattered in reviews and jour- 
nals, and never reprinted, is contained in 
a novel, a book of short stories, and a book 
of verse. None of them are accessible, and 

157 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

one, not the least remarkable, exists only in 
its original edition of 1833, of which I have 
a copy. No one has ever yet done them 
entire justice. 

Pierre-Joseph Borel de Hauterive was 
born in Lyons 26 June, 1809, and died at 
Mostaganem, in Algeria, on 14 July, 1859. 
The events of his life are of no great im- 
portance, but his ill-luck was continuous. 
He was set to be an architect, and built a 
few houses and the once famous Cirque of 
the Boulevard du Temple. But he preferred 
the studios of his friends, and was soon pen- 
niless. His books brought him no money, 
he founded newspapers with names such 
as Le Satan, Vane d'or, and wrote articles, 
stories and poems wherever he could get 
them taken; finally, in 1846, through the 
help of Gautier and Mme. de Giradin, 
was appointed Inspector of Colonies at 
Mostaganem. There he built a house for 
himself which he called "Haute Pensee." 

158 



PETRUS BOREL 



In 1848 he was turned out of his post, and 
afterwards removed to another. He mar- 
ried, and had a son, Alderan-Andre-Petrus- 
Benoni; and died in misery in the year 

1859. 

The jeune et fatal poete has described 
himself under an imaginary name in the 
preface of one of his books: its exactitude 
is confirmed by all the portraits painted and 
the eulogies written by his friends. The 
two mottoes on the title-page of Rapsodies 
render its character with great exactness. 
One is chosen from Regnier, one from 
Malherbe. The former affirms the author 
to be, 

"Hautain, audacieux, conseiller de lui-meme, 
Et d'un coeur obstine se heurte a ce qu'il aime." 

The second, in the name of the book, de- 
clares : 

"Vous, dont les censures s'etendent 
Dessus les ouvrages de tous, 
Ce livre se moque de vous.'* 

159 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

Nothing more remained to be said, only 
there is a long preface: the end is fine 
irony: "Heuresement que pour se consoler 
de tout cela, il nous reste I'adultere ! le tabac 
de Maryland! et du papel espagnol pour 
cigaritos." He names himself "Un loup- 
cervier." "Mon republicanisme, c'est de la 
lycanthropie!" The word caught, he recap- 
tured it, and "le lycanthrope" will be found 
among his titles for himself. The book be- 
gins and ends with an avowal of poverty, 
and between that beginning and ending 
what romantic dreams, — what towers, chate- 
laines, what satisfaction to have only "a 
tattered cloak, a poignard, and the skies," if 
one can also "taste one's sorrows in an ele- 
gant tea-cup." The sombre Carlovingian 
manner is there. Is it from Hugo already 
that the romantic properties find their way 
into these pages, and this sort of antithesis : 

"Enfer! si ta peine est ma peine, 
Qu'en ce moment tu dois souffrir!" 
i6o 



PiXRUS BOREL 



It was in the air, and all the gay and fierce 
love-songs were what everybody was writ- 
ing. What is personal comes in, here for 
instance, where the vagabond life of Petrus 
and his companions is indicated in a single 
quaint stanza: 

"Chats de coulisse, endeves! 
Devant la salle ebahie 
Traversant, rideaux leves, 
Le Theatre de la vie." 

And there is the ceaseless refrain which re- 
turns throughout his whole work : 

"Naitre, souffrir, mourir, c'est tout dans la nature 
Ce que rhomme pergoit; car elle est un bouquin 
Qu'on ne peut dechiffrer: un manuscrit arabe 
Aux mains d'un muletier : hors le titre et le fin 
II n'interprete rien, rien, pas une syllable." 

The wolf barks harshly enough, and to little 
purpose, in the political pieces, but has not 
yet tasted blood. Champavert is hardly 
anticipated in Agarite, the one dainty frag- 
ment of dialogue, with its instant of drama. 
i6i 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



All this, however, is in the interval, and we 
end with a desperate epilogue: "J'^i faim." 
It is curious how many things which 
Petrus Borel could not achieve he left as an 
impetus to others. Few readers probably 
have paid any heed to the motto, of the fifth 
Ariette oubliee of the Romances sans 
Paroles: 

"Son joyeux, importun d'un clavecin sonore." 

Verlaine's poem is a miraculous transposi- 
tion of what Borel only suggests in his poem, 
which is called Doleance and is a personal 
lament. But he has taken from it all that 
he needs; there is, besides the line quoted, 
the "Parle, que me veux-tu ?" which may be 
discerned in "Que voudrais-tu de moi?" 
May not "une main frele" come from: 

"Indiscret, d'ou viens tu? Sans doute une main 
blanche, 
Un beau doigt prisonnier 
Dans de riches joyaux a frappe sur ton anche 
D'ivoire et d'ebenier?" 
162 




Medallion of Petrus Borel 



PETRUS BOREL 



Of a bitter, personal lament, in which the 
"clavecin sonore" is a mere starting-point, 
Verlaine has made a floating, vague, and 
divine dream of music scarcely heard in a 
twilight: no more than that, but a master- 
piece. But to him, as to others, it was 
Petrus who had given the first impulse. 

Petrus BoreFs best poem is not to be found 
in the Rapsodies, but in the form of a pro- 
logue to Madame Putiphar. It is filled 
with a grave and remote phantasy, and in 
its cold ardour, its romantic equipment, and 
its naked self under that cloak, it anticipates 
Baudelaire, and is almost worthy of him. 
Baudelaire was conscious of its merit, and 
has defined it as, "un etrange poeme, d'une 
sonorite si eclatante et d'une couleur 
presque primitive a force d'intensite." The 
poem is a cavalcade of three adversaries in 
the soul : the world, a mystic's solitude, and 
death. The picture of each is given: the 
first, young, gay in his steel corslet on his 
163 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



caparisoned horse; the second bestrides a 
bony mule; the third, a hideous gnome, bears 
at his side a great fishhook, on which hangs 
nets of unclean creatures. And so, he ends, 
after praising and cursing each in turn, with 
admiration and hate, 

"Ainsi, depuis long-temps, s'entrechoque et se taille 

Cet infernal trio, — ces trois tiers spadassins: 

lis ont pris, les mechants, pour leur champ de 

bataille, 
Mon pauvre coeur, meurtri sous leurs coups as- 
sassins, 
Mon pauvre coeur navre, qui s'affaisse et se broie, 
Douteur, religieux, fou, mondain, mecreant! 
Quand finira la lutte, et qui m'aura pour proie, — 
Dieu le salt! — du Desert, du Monde ou du Neant?" 

In the year 1833 ^ book of between four 
and five hundred pages was published in 
Paris by the firm of Eugene Renduel, under 
the title: Champavert. Contes Immoraux, 
par Petrus Borel, le Lycanthrope. The first 
thirty-eight pages contain a Notice sur 
164 



PETRUS BOREL 



Champavert, written by the author, and 
professing that Petrus Borel was dead, and 
that his real name had been Champavert. 
Some of the poems published two years be- 
fore in the Rapsodies are quoted, and some 
biographical notes, not perhaps imaginary, 
are given. The rest of the book contains 
seven stories, named: Monsieur de VAr- 
gentler e, V Accusal eur, J agues Banaon, le 
Charpentier (La Havane), Don Andrea 
Vesalius, V Anatomist e (Madrid), Three 
Fingered Jack, VOhi (La Jamaique), Dina, 
la Belle Juive (Lyon), Passer eau, VEcolier 
(Paris), and Champavert, le Lycanthrope 
(Paris). 

Each has a motto, or a series of mottoes, 
on the fly leaf of its title, mostly from the 
Bible, and from contemporary poets, Gerard, 
Gautier, Musset. Each story is divided 
into a great number of divisions, and every 
division has its own title, more often in 
English, Spanish, Latin, or Provengal than 
I6S 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



in French. These seven stories, though not 
immoral, as they profess to be, in the defiant 
manner of the day, are as extraordinary 
as any production of the human brain. All 
are studies in horrors and iniquities; above 
all, in the shedding of blood. Written by 
anyone else they would be revolting, for they 
spare no detail of monstrous deeds; they 
v^ould be pitiless but for their immense self- 
pity; cruel but for their irony, which is a 
bitter, personal, and at times magnificent 
arraignment of things. They are crude, ex- 
travagant, built up out of crumbling and 
far-sought materials; they are deliberately 
improbable, and the persons who sin and 
suffer in them are males all brain and 
females all idols and ideals. They are as far 
from reality as intention and style can make 
them; a world of vari-coloured puppets 
swinging on unregulated wires. And yet 
these violences and crudities and all this dig- 
ging in graveyards and fumbling in the dead 
i66 



PETRUS BOREL 



souls of the treacherous and the unforgiving, 
have something in them or under them, a 
sincerity, a real hatred of evil and unholy 
things, which keeps us from turning away, 
as our first impulse may well be, in mere 
disgust. A man, suffering from some deadly 
misery, leaps before us in ironical gym- 
nastics, and comes down with his mortal 
laugh, a clown, in the arena. That is what 
makes the book tragic, a buffoon's criticism 
of life; there is philosophy in it, and an 
angry pathos. 

'• Can the sense of horror become, to those 
accustoming themselves to it, a kind of 
luxury, like drunkenness? In another later 
book Borel tells us that it can: "Car il y a 
dans la douleur une volupte mysterieuse dont 
le malheureux est avide; car la souffrance 
est savoureuse comme le bonheur." Many 
great writers have had it, as a small part 
of their genius; Hugo had it, for instance, 
together with his passion for the tragically 
167 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

grotesque. But in this one writer horror 
seems to be almost the whole substance of 
his dreams. Whenever he seems about to 
open the door to beauty, horror shuts to 
the door. He does not suggest, he is 
minute, and will number every circumstance, 
which others would turn from. At times 
horror finds a voice in such a litany as Dina 
and the boatman chant on their dreadful 
voyage; or, with an appalling irony, in that 
scene where two negroes, fighting to death, 
stop suddenly at the sound of the convent 
bell striking eight, draw apart, kneel, re- 
peat the "Angelus" each taking his turn, 
pray silently for one another's souls, and 
then rise and hack and tear each other to 
pieces. We shudder and wonder, and find 
the horror almost insupportable; but we do 
not, as in a story of Pierre Louys, sicken 
at the calm, deliberate cruelty of the writer. 
In Petrus Borel horror is an obsession: its 
danger is at times to become an absurdity. 
i68 



PETRUS BOREL 



It is one of the defects of his hasty, de- 
fiant art, that we are not always sure 
whether, when he is absurd, he is absurd 
intentionally. And it pleased him to write 
a style which was half splendour and half 
rage. Listen to this jewellery of the senses 
before Huysmans: "Depraved by grief, she 
sought ardently for all that irritated her 
nerves, all that excited and awakened her 
apathy; she covered herself with the most 
heavily scented flowers ; she surrounded her- 
self with vases full of syringa, jasmine, 
vervain, roses, lilies, tuberoses; she burned 
incense and benzoin; she shook around her 
amber, cinnamon, storax, musk." And he 
will tell you that a woman is "pyramidally 
virtuous"; and I hardly know how often 
things are obombre, which is the Biblical 
"overshadowed." English and Spanish 
rudely decorated his pages, generally more 
accurate than in the seekers after this form 
of local colour in his time. He has many 
169 I 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



varieties of dialogue from the pompous to 
the abject, but all are done with an uneven 
energy. 

To be delivered from most of the beauti- 
ful as well as the discomforting things of 
the world, was the continual prayer of one 
who liked to be called "un lycanthrope." 
"La souffrance," he said, "a fait de moi un 
loup feroce," and the world to him was a 
thing "sur lequel je crache, que je meprise, 
que je repousse du pied." He realised that 
to think too closely about life was to be 
unhappy. And so that varying image of 
himself who goes through the best of his 
stories is the man who thinks and dies. 
What logic there is often in certain of the 
preposterous scenes, which reach their sum- 
mit in the dialogue between the man who 
wants to be guillotined ("not publicly, but 
in your back-garden") and M. Sanson, the 
state mechanician of the guillotine. The 
bourgeoisie itself is concentrated in one vast 
170 



PETRUS BOREL 



bewilderment in the professional gentle- 
man who doubts, with strict politeness, the 
sanity of a strange visitor who addresses 
him after this manner: "J^ jure par toutes 
vos oesophagotomies que j'ai mes saines et 
entieres faculties; seulement, le service que 
je vous prie de me rendre n'est point dans 
les moeurs." But the one splendid, franti- 
cally original, sentence, which gives the 
whole accent to this strange story, is: "Peu 
de chose, je voudrais simplement que vous 
me guillotinassiez." 

The whole story of Passereau, in which 
this is the most significant of several auda- 
cious and unparalleled incidents, has a 
macabre humour which is terrible, if you 
will, but personal, and at that time new. It 
has been seen since, and we find Baudelaire, 
consciously or not, taking the exact details 
of his murderous drunkard's action, in Le 
Vin de U Assassin, from the well in which 
Passereau drowns his mistress. The very 
171 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



words are almost the same. "Passereau 
alors," we read, "avec un grand effort, de- 
tache et fit tomber sur elle, une a une, les 
pierres brisees de la margelle," just as the 
drunkard in Baudelaire was to confess 
afterwards : 

"Je I'ai jetee au fond d'un puits, 
Et j'ai meme pousse sur elle 
Tous les paves de la margelle." 

Huysmans is anticipated, not only in such 
a passage as I have quoted, but in that sketch 
of an earlier des Esseintes : "Sometimes, the 
bad weather, having gone on without inter- 
mission, he remained cloistered for a whole 
month, surrounded perpetually by lamps, 
by torches, flooded by a splendid artificial 
daylight; reading, writing sometimes, but 
more often drunk or asleep. His door was 
closed against everyone but Albert, who 
came very readily, to shut himself up with 
him; not crazed by the same delirium, the 
172 



PETRUS BOREL 



same suffering, the same desolation, but for 
the oddity of the thing, for the chance of 
taking hfe in a wrong sense and of parody- 
ing this rectihneal bourgeoisie." Is it not 
almost to the very word characterising it, 
the plan of existence in A Rehoursf 

If a wild but living sketch may be com- 
pared, at whatever distance, with a flawless 
picture, it might be said that there is some- 
thing in the power of creating a sense of 
suspense at the opening of a story, and in 
developing it to the explicit horror of the 
end, in which Petrus Borel sometimes re- 
minds us of Poe. Still more does he at 
times seem to anticipate Villiers de L'lsle- 
Adam. How like a first sketch of Villiers 
is the idea of suicide by guillotine, and the 
mock-pedantic form of the letter to the 
"Commission des Petitions": "Dans un 
moment ou la nation est dans la penurie et 
le tresor phtisique au troisieme degre, dans 
un moment ou les delicieux contribuables 

173 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



ont vendu jusqu'a leurs bretelles pour solver 
les taxes, sur-taxes, contre-taxes, re-taxes,^ 
super-taxes, archi-taxes, impots et contre- 
impots, tailler et retailler, capitations, archi- 
capitations et avanies; dans un moment ou 
votre monarchie oberee et votre souveraine 
piriforme branlent dans le manche, il est du 
devoir de tout bon citoyen," and so forth. 

"To sing of love!" he says in the Testa- 
ments. It is a catalogue of his work; not 
Beddoes was more funereal. Is this obses- 
sion of blood, this continual consciousness 
of evil, this inability to see any but the dark 
contraries of things, a mere boastful affec- 
tation or the only possible way of expressing 
a personality so full of discontent, and bitter 
knowledge of reasoned complaint? All his 
stories have such a dissection, such a passing 
of all things through so bitter a crucible. 
"Pauvre Job au fumier," he calls himself in 
a poem, which seems to be sincere. 

Petrus Borel's next and last complete 
; 174 



PETRUS BOREL 



work, his "triste epopee," as he called it, 
was not published till six years after 
Champavert. The mood has again changed, 
or rather changes in the course of the in- 
terminable pages; the style is elaborated, 
and used with a singular, paradoxical effort. 
The name, Madame Putiphar, is of a nature 
to call up anticipations which are far 
from being gratified. Never was virtue so 
magnanimously or more preposterously 
presented, praised, and carried unshaken 
through unheard of tribulations. Beings so 
transcendently moral and so consistently led 
by their merits and good deeds into pitfalls 
which the smallest worldly common-sense 
would have avoided, do not exist in fiction. 
A sentence in the book, not meant to refer 
to them, defines with perfect accuracy the 
manner of their treatment. "There are cer- 
tain cases," we are told, "where really 
reason has so stupid an air, where logic has 
so absurd a figure, that one has to be ex- 
175 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



tremely serious if one does not laugh in 
their faces." Is Deborah or Patrick Mac- 
Whyte the more saintly, the more heroic? 
It would be difficult to say, especially, as, by 
a further freak of their chronicler, they are 
set for the most part to speak in a language 
so formal and artificial that the feeling it 
is meant to convey is only to be faintly seen 
through it. Here is Deborah speaking, at a 
moment of crisis, to her husband. "Veuillez 
croire que je sais vous estimer," she says; 
"je ne suis point assez impertinente pour 
me supposer I'auteur de votre delicatesse et 
presumer que sans vos rapports avec moi" 
vous eussiez ete un malhonnete homme; 
mais, sans fatuite, il m'etoit bien permis de 
penser que, livre a vous-meme, sans liens, 
sans serments, sans dilection emplissant 
votre coeur, place dans la fatale alternative 
oil vous vous etes trouve, vous auriez pu 
preferer manquer a I'exigence de vos ver- 
tueux principes," and much more: but no, 
176 



PETRUS BOREL 



the faultless man would have been quite 
capable of doing it all, on his own account. 
It is from the very explicit and perilous trial 
of his virtue by a Madame Putiphar who is 
meant to typify the worst side of the Pompa- 
dour that the book takes its name. Here, 
as elsewhere, the snares of evil are but 
vaunted to be trampled upon, and the picture 
which is called up: "flowers, candles, per- 
fumes, sofas, vases, ribbons, damask, a 
lovely voice, a mandoline, mirrors, jewels, 
diamonds, necklaces, rings, earrings, a lovely 
and gracious woman lying back languor- 
ously," are but the prologue to a condemna- 
tion. 

The story itself begins with an arraign- 
ment of Providence, as if to justify the ways 
of man to God. "If there is a Providence, 
it often acts in strange ways! woe to him 
predestined to follow a strange way!" Such 
are these martyrs of their own virtue, and 
they are shown as, in a way, God^s puppets. 
177 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

There is a sentence which might have been 
written by Thomas Hardy, so clearly does it 
state, in an image like one of his own, the 
very centre of his philosophy. "I have often 
heard that certain insects were made for 
the amusement of children; perhaps man 
also was created for the same pleasures of 
superior beings, who delight in torturing 
him, and disport themselves in his groans." 
There he states his own problem: the book 
is to be an illustration of it; hence the hor- 
rors and the angelic natures that endure 
them. But he has no explanation to give, 
and can but bow down, like a later mouth- 
piece of Villiers, "before the darkness." 

It is from this gloomy and hopeless point 
of view that the whole horrors of the story 
are presented, up to page 250 of the second 
volume. Then, suddenly, comes a change 
of direction, and the last sixty out of the 
six hundred pages are written from this 
new point of view. "When I took up my 

178 



PETRUS BOREL 



pen to write this book my mind was full 
of doubts, of negations, of errors. But I 
know not by what mysterious means light 
has come to me on the way. I have con- 
strained myself in the whole of this book 
to make vice flourish and dissoluteness over- 
come virtue ; I have crowned roses with rot- 
tenness; I have perfumed iniquity with 
nard; I have poured overflowing happiness 
into the lap of infamy; I have brought the 
firmament down to the gutter; I have put 
dirt in the sky; not one of my brave heroes 
has not been a victim; everywhere I have 
shown evil as the oppressor and good as the 
oppressed." And now, he affirms, all these 
cruel accumulated destinies have turned 
upon him, after all his pains to interpret 
them, and have given him the lie. 

"There is a Providence," he cries now, 
a God of Vengeance. The just man, if he 
suffers, suffers from some ancestral or at- 
tributed sin; and evil is destroyed by the 
. 179 



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action of God or some destroying power in 
man. "Croyez a un Dieu punisseur ici bas !" 
he cries, or the world will be an enigma 
without a secret, an absurd, impossible 
charade. And he brings the great symbol 
of useful destruction, the French Revolu- 
tion, to end his arraignment of the cruelty 
of things by a vengeance in which man 
takes back his rights, the sheep shearing the 
shearer, the people crushing its giants like a 
rag between its fists. And for him it is 
the approach of the hour when all those 
miseries that he has sung, and mountains 
more of them, shall weigh down the ultimate 
scale of the balances of the wrath of God. 
In this sudden illumination, this prophetic 
outburst, which ends a book full of clouds, 
dissonances, errors, absurdities, but always 
sincere, noble or tending blindly towards 
nobility, we see certain brave and serious 
convictions underlying all that is contra- 
dictory and uncertain in a creature of pas- 
i8o 



P^TRUS BOREL 



sionate and eccentric imagination. When a 
people, he says, revolts against its deities, 
its first act is to break their images. That 
is what he does in these pages, where none 
of his deities are allowed to be logical. 

A book so incoherent defies analysis, but 
it is not difficult to see how closely the truth 
is followed in many of the details, the Defoe- 
like dungeon scenes, in particular, which 
are full of a painful reality, passing at least 
once, in the death-scene of Fitz-Harris, 
into notes as of an instrumental solo, as he 
cries in the last ecstasy of death in the pit's 
darkness, "All shines like a carbuncle; all 
is flaming, caressing, wavering, dusty." 

For the actual part of these scenes Petrus 
Borel has an invaluable model in the nar- 
rative of de Latude. No one, so far as I 
know, has identified the very striking re- 
semblance between scenes in which, equally, 
we grope from horror to horror. My copy 
of Le Depotism Devoile, ou memoires de 
i8i 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



Henri Masers De Latude, detenu pendant 
trente-cinq ans dans divers prisons d'Etat, 
is dated 1790, "imprime aux frais de M. de 
Latude," and authenticated by his signature, 
in his own handwriting, at the foot of the 
preHminary Avertissement. All the names 
of the governors of the prison, and of 
fellow-prisoners are taken by Borel from de 
Latude, in one instance almost word for 
word : and the characterisation of Guyonnet, 
the first Governor of the Donjon of Vin- 
cennes ("I'honnete M. de Guyonnet," as 
Borel calls him ; "homme delicat et honnete," 
as he is called by de Latude), of Rouge- 
mont, his successor, who, in both narratives, 
is represented as the same odious tyrant, 
tampering with the prisoners' food, brick-, 
ing up the little light left in their windows, 
suppressing their walks in the open air, 
"un sot, un fat, un puant, un pince-maille, 
un belitre," as Borel calls him, is in both 
identical. The terrible lieutenant-general of 
182 



PETRUS BOREL 



police, defined by Borel as "un mauvais 
charlatan en maniere de magistrate," is seen 
at much greater length in de Latude, who 
prints perhaps the most ghastly letter in the 
world. "II feroit a-propos," he writes to 
the Minister, "de le transferer au Donjon 
de Vincennes, ou il y a moins de prisonniers 
qu'a la Bastille, et de I'y oublier." In that 
phrase are exceeded all the horrors of 
Madame Putiphar. 

Whatever was the good or evil reputa- 
tion of the Pompadour who figures as 
Madame Putiphar in his pages, I find, in the 
evidently veracious and documented pages 
of de Latude, confirmation enough to justify 
that part of Borel's characterisation which 
is concerned with her vindictive and destroy- 
ing frivolity. "What then has been my 
crime?" de Latude questions. "At the age 
of twenty-three years, misled by an access 
of ambition which was simply absurd, I dis- 
pleased la Marquise de Pompadour, I of- 
183 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

fended her, if you will, and that is a good 
deal to admit. At forty years, worn out by 
seventeen years of captivity and of tears": 
— but not yet nearly at the end of either. 
And he affirms : "Also she has never given 
liberty, as it is asserted, to any of those 
whom she has hurled into chains; she shut 
down for ever in the dungeon walls their 
sighs and their anger." And he names 
(Borel names them after him) a Baron de 
Venae, who was imprisoned in the Donjon 
for nineteen years for having given the 
Pompadour a piece of good advice which 
"humbled her pride"; a Baron de Vissec, 
seventeen years imprisoned on the suspicion 
that he had spoken against her ; a Chevalier 
de Rochequerault, suspected of being the 
writer of a pamphlet against her, imprisoned 
for twenty-three years. Borel and Latude's 
books, in scarcely less impressive ways, 
represent the moment of her death, and 
their natural hopes that a personal vengeance 
184 



PETRUS BOREL 



would be set right at last by the law. "I 
thought I saw the skies purple with shame," 
de Latude tells us. "Not even the idea came 
to me that there could be any delay in 
breaking my chains." For de Latude and 
for the innocent prisoners of Borel no key 
unlocks a door, and it is Borel who repre- 
sents the dying woman writing a great "no" 
in a last refusal of mercy. 

All this, then, and the episode of Mal- 
sherbes visiting a prisoner in the pit of a 
dungeon, drawing him up into the light, 
and then persuaded by false tidings to leave 
him to his fate, is historical fact, and is 
used by Borel as part of a story, which has 
so much of the document where it seems 
most the invention of a story-teller. Not 
less real, in its properly artificial way, is the 
adventure of the Parc-aux-Cerfs. Borel 
seeks too often such local colour as "aze- 
derach," a Syrian tree, or the plants 
mahaleb" and "aligousier." Pedantry 

185 






COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

comes in here as in other ways and places; 
as for instance, in the return to old spell- 
ings in avoit, touts, ahyme, gryllons. Ped- 
antry passes into ignorance in certain 
English words, which we may set partly 
to the credit of those printers whom he calls 
to account on one of his last pages. Strange 
metaphors flourish on all the pages, as when 
"il lui sembloit qu'il venoit de contracter 
avec les pieues de son cachot, avec ses fers, 
un hymen indissoluble, un hymen eternal, 
ne devant rompre qu'a la mort." There are 
windy howlings, the "Lycanthropie" I sup- 
pose, and at times grave silences, like this, 
with its sombre air as of Villiers: "Elle 
etoit du nombre de celles qui jamais ne 
s'effacent." Everywhere there is, in Baude- 
laire's phrase about him, "le charme de la 
volonte" ; and the sign that "il aimait f eroce- 
ment les lettres," as the same great critic 
characterised him, after his exact manner, 
in an adverb. 
1907. 

186 



NOTES ON PARIS AND 
PAUL VERLAINE 



THE ABSINTHE-DRINKER 

Gently I wave the visible world away. 
Far off, I hear a roar, afar yet near. 
Far off and strange, a voice is in my ear. 
And is the voice my own ? the words I say 
Fall strangely, like a dream, across the day; 
And the dim sunshine is a dream. How clear, 
New as the world to lovers* eyes, appear 
The men and women passing on their way! 

The world is very fair. The hours are all 
Linked in a dance of mere forgetfulness. 
I am at peace with God and man. O glide^ 
Sands of the hour-glass that I count not, fall 
Serenely: scarce I feel your soft caress. 
Rocked on this dreamy and indifferent tide. 

Boulevard Saint Germain. 

Aux Deux Magots, 

Paris, 1890. 



189 



I 

AT THE CAFE FRANgOIS PREMIER 

Literary French Bohemia congregates in 
certain cafes of the Boulevard St. Michel 
— in the Cafe Vachette, the Soleil d'Or, the 
Cafe Francois Premier. When I was in 
Paris in 1890 it was at the Frangois Premier 
that Verlaine had taken up his headquarters, 
possibly for no other reason than that it was 
near the hotel where he was then living. 
The cafe is situated high up the boulevard, 
at the less frequented end — just at the corner 
of the Rue Gay-Lussac. There I used to 
meet my friends the Decadents and the 
Symbolistes. 

It is an evening in May: the clock points 

to half -past eleven. I am strolling along in 

front of the crowded cafes, watching all this 

delightful effervescence of life — the noisy, 

191 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



pleasant gaiety of the Boul' Mich* near mid- 
night. Suddenly I hear a strident voice be- 
hind me: "Comment allez-vous, Monsieur 
Symons?" It is Jean Moreas. I turn, and 
he asks me to come with him to the cafe. 
Moreas is a Greek, and he has the dark 
features, blue-black hair, and half-savage, 
half-sullen black eyes which characterise the 
modern Athenian. An eternal monocle 
sticks jauntily in his eye. As we walk up 
the boulevard he begins to talk about his 
poems. At that time Moreas — who has 
since published a volume, Le Pelerin Pas- 
sionne, which has given him a certain 
vogue — ^had published two volumes — Les 
Syrtes and Les Cantilenes. There is a 
slight but genuine inspiration in these frag- 
mentary songs and ballads ; one finds touches 
of naive charm, a faintly fantastic grace, 
a quaint, archaic simplicity. I had just been 
reading the Cantilenes, and I told him 
how some of the pieces had charmed me. 
192 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

He began to recite, waving his arm and roll- 
ing out the consonants with all the emphasis 
of his iron voice. Moreas has two subjects 
of conversation, his own poems and Hamlet. 
He does not recite Hamlet, but the poems 
he recites at every opportunity, with a fine 
disregard of surroundings. I have heard 
him chanting them in a restaurant to the 
waitress, the charming Celine, surprised but 
impartial. In time we reach the Cafe 
Francois Premier, at the corner of the Rue 
Gay-Lussac. Voices hail us from a table 
to the right. There we find Charles Vig- 
nier, author of a book of verses called 
Centon, with his pale, elegant, perverse face, 
his blond plausiveness, always a veiled sneer 
about his lips. He is telling a dubious story, 
with a feigned air of remoteness, and the 
others are laughing. Opposite to him is 
Fernand Langlois, the young artist, whom 
I had met one memorable night at Ver- 
laine's. He is incredibly tall and thin and 
193 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

youthful, with an air already of exhaustion, 
a tired grey look upon his features ; he speaks 
in a soft, caressing, feminine voice, with 
the accents of a petted girl; he fixes large 
brown eyes upon you with a troubling in- 
tensity. Then there is a musician whose 
name I forget — it is not known to fame — a 
commonplace, bourgeois sort of person. 
And there are others, men who have printed 
and men who have only written verses. 
The conversation, out of compliment to me, 
turns upon English poetry. They are very 
anxious to know all I can tell them about 
Swinburne. Swinburne is well known by 
name in France, and since then an admirable 
prose translation of the Poems and Bal- 
lads has been made by Gabriel Mourey. 
They question me about Tennyson, about 
Browning, about Rossetti; they want to 
know who are the new poets, the new novel- 
ists; finally they insist on my repeating to 
them some English poetry, so that they may 
194 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

hear how it sounds — for none of them know 
EngHsh, Midnight has long past when the 
door is flung open, and Verlaine appears, 
followed by a noisy crowd of young men. 
Verlaine is leaning on his stick, his grey 
hat is pushed back, he gesticulates, explodes 
into conversation. When at last he can be 
prevailed upon to sit down, he too joins in 
the talk about things English. Verlaine at 
one time spent some years in England, and 
he is very proud of his knowledge of Eng- 
lish, The conversation has become dis- 
jointed. Vignier, with his sceptical, ironical 
smile on his lips, is talking in a low voice 
to a man who sat down by his side ; Moreas 
is thundering out some of his resonant 
verses, with that grand wave of the arm; 
more "bocks" are being ordered. And now 
all around there is a movement, a rattle of 
money, the sound of glasses being laid down, 
a hubbub of voices; men push past us on 
their way to the door, the women arrange 
195 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

their hats and nod farewells. It is closing 
time. "On ferme, Messieurs, on ferme!"' 
shouts the gerant. Slowly, slowly, the un- 
welcome warning is obeyed. We are almost 
the last to go, and we file out, one by one, 
through the only door left open for our pas- 
sage. In groups of two or three we stroll 
down the boulevard, refreshingly cool after 
the heated interior. I walk with Fernand 
Langlois, and we talk of art, of Gustave 
Moreau, of Puvis de Chavannes, of Burne- 
Jones, of Rossetti. One after another has 
dropped off, and when we come to the Rue 
Racine, I too say good-bye, and make my 
way homeward to my hotel under the shadow 
of the Odeon. 



196 



II 

THE MAN 

Not many years ago Paul Verlaine — 
whom serious critics are now beginning to 
speak of as the greatest Hving French poet 
— was almost unknown, even in France. An 
odd Httle circle of Decadents and Sym- 
bolistes had the wisdom to venerate him as 
a master, and the kindness to pay for his 
absinthe at the Cafes. Certain writers, like 
Huysmans — independent of these narrow 
cliques — did something to widen a reputa- 
tion which had so far been merely something 
vague, something rather scandalous. Then 
the Andrew Lang of Paris, Jules Lemaitre, 
took up this more or less obscure writer and 
handsomely presented him to the boulevards. 
To-day they interview him in the Figaro, 
and the Gaulois tells you which hospital he 
is in at the moment. 

197 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



''^^^'^'^ //j/^ 





The Characteristic Signature of Paul Verlaine 



198 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

The greatest living French poet I have 
called him, and I do not know whose claims 
can really be held to surpass the claims of 
the author of Romances sans Paroles and 
Sagesse, The former volume I remember 
seeing in Coppee's book-case, and I remem- 
ber wondering whether Coppee had ever 
thought of Verlaine as a serious rival. Le- 
conte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, Theodore 
de Banville — all admirable poets, each in his 
own very different way — all poets who have 
"succeeded," as it is called; but I for one 
would rather have written the little song 
of the wind — II pleure dans mon coeur — 
than even Un Acte de Charite, than even 
Le Vase Brise, than even the deftest of 
the Odes Funambulesques. The note of 
Verlaine's poetry is new in French verse; 
his form is new. For the first time the 
French language has become capable of all 
the delicate songfulness of the English 
language; those stiff, impracticable lines 
199 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



which Victor Hugo bent, Verlaine has 
broken. His verse is as lyrical as Shelley's, 
as fluid, as magical — though the magic is a 
new one. It is a twilight art, full of reti- 
cence, of perfumed shadows, of hushed 
melodies. It suggests, it gives impressions, 
with a subtle avoidance of any too definite 
or precise effect of line or colour. The 
words are now recherche, now confidently 
commonplace — words of the boudoir, words 
of the street! The impressions are remote 
and fleeting as a melody evoked from the 
piano by a frail hand in the darkness of a 
scented room: 

"Qu' est-ce que c'est que ce berceau soudain 
Qui lentement dorlote mon pauvre etre? 
Que voudrais-tu de moi, doux chant badin ? 
Qu' as-tu voulu, fin refrain incertain, 
Qui vas tantot mourir vers la fenetre 
Ouverte un peu sur le petit jardin?" 

Or, again, the impressions are as close and 
vivid as the circling flight of the wooden 

200 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

horses at the fair of St. Gilles, in Brussels : 

"Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois, 
Tournez cent tours, tournez mille tours; 
Tournez souvent et tournez tou jours, 
Tournez, tournez au son des hautboisl" 

Or, again, they are as sharp, personal, and 
brutal as the song of prisoners turning "the 
mill of destiny" : 

"Aliens, f reres, bons vieux voleurs, 
Doux vagabonds, 
Filons en fleur, 
Mes chers, mes bons; 
Fumons philosophiquement, 
Promenons-nous 
Paisiblement ; 
Rien faire est doux." 

The apparent contradiction between the 
exquisite and the brutal part of Verlaine's 
work — ^almost all of the work is exquisite — 
is simply the outcome of a temperament 
which has always been untamable, a career 

201 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



which has been impervious to every influence 
but the sudden, overwhelming influence of 
the moment — towards good, or towards evil. 
Paul Verlaine was born at Metz, March' 
30, 1844. His father, an officer, received 
his baptism of fire at Waterloo. Verlaine 
spend his childhood at Montpellier, was 
educated at Paris, and, at the age of twenty- 
three, brought out, under the wing of the 
Parnasse Contemporain, a volume of verse, 
Poemes Saturniens. It was at the same time 
that Coppee published his first volume, 
equally unnoticed then, Le Reliquaire. Two 
years later Verlaine made a sort of literary 
success with the Fetes Galantes. Next year, 
in 1870, occurred his unhappy marriage — 
a marriage at first all happiness — and it was 
in honour of his girl-wife that he published 
a tiny book of verse, La Bonne Chanson. 
When, four years later, the Romances sans 
Paroles appeared, Verlaine had already 
given way to every kind of self-indulgence, 

202 




Cartoon of Arthur Rimbaud 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

and with a sort of mad Bohemian gaiety 
was trailing a strange companion, the young 
poet, Arthur Rimbaud, over France, Brus- 
sels, Germany, and England. The pilgrim- 
age was ended by a pistol-shot (I have heard 
Verlaine talk of it, very coolly) and for 
eighteen months Verlaine was in solitary 
confinement at Mons. He came out of 
prison a fervent Catholic, and after seven 
years* silence a volume of religious poems, 
Sag esse (1881) — one of the most sincere 
books ever written — was published obscurely 
at the office of a Catholic publisher named 
Victor Palme. Verlaine's faith is un- 
questionably genuine, but it has never had 
a very appreciable influence upon his con- 
duct. Always in misery, in penury, now 
lodging at the expense of his friends in some 
miserable garni, now, a little more com- 
fortably and without expense, in hospital, he 
has published Jadis et Naguere (1884), a 
book of poems which represents every side 

203 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



of his work, Amour (1888), a pendant to 
Sag esse, and Parallelement (1889), its 
antithesis. A volume of privately printed 
Dedicaces (sonnets to his friends) appeared 
in 1890, and he has written a book of criti- 
cism, Les Poetes Maudits, and one or two 
collections of tales in prose. A new volume 
of poems, Bonheur, long expected, appeared 
in 1 89 1. Bonheur — Happiness — a strange 
title to be chosen by one who has apparently 
had so little of it, or who has grasped it 
with so feverish a haste as to crush it in the 
grasp. But Verlaine is perfectly aware 
of the many touches of irony which mark 
his strange career, and it was doubtless not 
without a consciousness of the full signifi- 
cance of the word that he named a volume 
of his poems Sagesse — Wisdom. 



204 



Ill 

BONHEUR 

Some years ago, in a book rather of con- 
fession than of criticism, Paul Verlaine 
announced his intention (somewhat too 
formally, perhaps) of dividing his poetic 
work into two distinct sections, to be pub- 
lished in parallel series. Sagesse, Amour, 
Bonheiir, were to "make for righteousness"; 
Parallelement was to be frankly sensual; 
between them, he imagined, the whole man 
— that strange, composite, though not com- 
plex nature — would be fully and finally ex- 
pressed. Bonheur, the third part, complet- 
ing the trilogy, appeared in 1891. 

Bonheur is written very much in the style 
of Sag esse, and a great part of it might be. 
assigned, on internal evidence, to a period 
anterior to Amour and Parallelement. It 
has none of the perversity, moral and 

205 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



artistic, of the latter book, despite a few 
experiments upon metre and rhyme. Nor 
is space devoted, as occasionally in Amour, 
to the mere courtesies of literary friendship. 
The verse has an exquisite simplicity, a 
limpid clearness, a strenuous rejection of 
every sort of artistic "dandyism" — the word 
is Verlaine's: 

"et que cet arsenal, 
Chics fougueux et froids, mots sees, phrase re- 

dondante, 
Et cetera, se rende a I'emeute grondante 
Des sentiments enfin naturels et reels." 

I take these lines from a poem which may 
be considered a new "Art Poetique." In 
that delicate and magical poem — itself the 
ideal of the art it sang — ^Verlaine said noth- 
ing about sincerity, except, inferentially, to 
the fleeting expression of something almost 
too vague for words. Music first of all and 
before all, and then, not colour, but the 
nuance, the last fine shade. Poetry is to be 
ti 206 











Paul Verlaine, from a sketch made in London 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

something intangible, a winged soul in flight 
"towards other skies and other loves." To 
express the inexpressible, he speaks of 
beautiful eyes behind a veil, of the full pal- 
pitating sunlight of noon, of the blue swarm 
of clear stars in a cool autumn sky; and the 
verse in which he makes his confession of 
faith has the exquisite troubled beauty — 
"sans rien en lui qui pese ou qui pose" — 
which he commends as the essential poetry. 
Now, in this new poem of poetical counsel, 
he tells us that art should, first of all, be 
absolutely clear and sincere; it is the law 
of necessity, hard, no doubt, but the law: 

"L'art, mes enfants, c'est d'etre absolument soi- 

meme. 
Foin! d'un art qui blaspheme et fi! d'un art qui 

pose, 
Et vive un vers bien simple, autrement c'est la 

prose." 

The verse in Bonheur is indeed "bien 
simple." There is a poem addressed to a 
207 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



friend — "Men ami, ma plus belle amitie, ma 
meilleure" — which even Verlaine has hardly- 
excelled in a kind of plaintive sincerity, full 
of the beauty of simple human feeling, seek- 
ing and finding the most direct expression: 

"Aussi, precieux toi plus cher que tous les moi 
Que je fus et serai si doit durer ma vie, 
Soyons tout I'un pour I'autre en depit de Tenvie, 
Soyons tout Tun a I'autre en toute bonne foi." 

Verlaine speaks to his friend as if he would 
say more for friendship than has ever been 
said before. He would fain find words close 
and gracious enough to express all the in- 
timacy and charm of their friendship: 

"Elle verse a mes yeux, qui ne pleureront plus, 
Un paisible sommeil, dans la nuit transparente 
Que de reves legers benissent, troupe errante 
De souvenirs futurs et d'espoirs revolus." 

"Remembrances to be, and hopes returned 
again" — ^how lovely a verse, French or Eng- 
lish! And the emotion, temperate and re- 
208 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 



strained through most of the poem, rises at 
the end into exaltation: 

"Afin qu'enfin ce Jesus-Christ qui nous crea 
Nous f asse grace et f asse grace au monde immonde 
D'autour de nous alors unis — paix sans seconde ! — 
Definitivement, et dicte: Alleluia." 

I quote this stanza not only because of its 
place in the poem — its expression of the 
culminating emotion — ^but because it is an 
excellent example of Verlaine's most char- 
acteristic technique. Note the rhyme at the 
beginning of the first line and at the end of 
the second, the alUteration, the curious effect 
produced by the repetition of "fasse grace" 
(itself an assonance), the tormented rhythm 
throughout, the arbitrary and extraordinary 
position and transposition of accents. It 
cannot be said that all these experiences 
are always and equally successful; but it is 
useless to deny that Verlaine has widened 
the capacities of French verse. He has done 
209 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

what Goncourt has done in his prose: he 
has contributed to the destruction of a 
classical language, which, within its narrow 
limits, had its own perfection. But how 
great a gain there has been, along with this 
inevitable loss! In the hands of the noisy 
little school of Decadents, the brainsick 
little school of Symbolistes, both claiming 
Verlaine as a master, these innovations have 
of course been carried to the furthest limits 
of unconscious caricature. In Paris, a facti- 
tious clamour arose about a young Greek, 
Jean Moreas, a person who at one time had 
a very distinct talent for verse, which he 
wrote in regular metre, and without more 
of foreign idiom than his Athenian origin 
would lead one to expect. As one of his 
admirers calmly remarks, "il repudie toute 
regie preetablie pour la contexture de ses 
vers." From these extravagances Verlame 
has always held aloof; and in an article pub- 
lished in 1890 he has given his opinion very 
210 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

frankly on those young confreres who re- 
proach him, he tells us, "with having kept 
a metre, and in this metre some caesura, 
and rhymes at the end of the lines. Mon 
Dieu!" he adds, "I thought I had 'broken' 
verse quite sufficiently." In Bonheur, for 
the first time in his work, there is one short 
poem — a concession to these young con- 
freres — written in irregular unrhymed 
verse; verse, however, which is still verse, 
and not delirious prose. There are also two 
poems in assonant verse, one of them in 
lines of fourteen syllables, metrically quite 
regular. It is difficult to see any reason for 
the rejection of rhymes, but at all events 
they are rejected without disdain — frankly 
for a caprice. 

Almost all the poems in Bonheur are 
closely personal — confessions of weakness, 
confessions of penitence, confessions of 
'Tennui de vivre avec les gens et dans les 
choses," confessions of good attempts foiled, 

211 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



of unachieved resolutions. With a touch of 
characteristic self-criticism Verlaine says in 
one place : 

"Mais, helas! je ratiocine 
Sur mes fautes et mes douleurs, 
Espece de mauvais Racine 
Analysant jusqu'a mes pleurs." 

And in its measure and degree this is true: 
there are times when confession becomes 
analysis, not to the advantage of the poetry. 
But, here as in Sagesse, the really dis- 
tinguishing work is an outpouring of desires 
that speak the language of desire, of prayers 
that go up to God as prayers, not as litera- 
ture; of confessions that have no reticences. 
One of the finest pieces tells the story of 
that endeavour to rebuild the ruined house 
of life which Verlaine made at the time of 
his conversion, after those calm and salutary 
eighteen months of seclusion. This in- 
tensely personal poem, which is really a piece 

212 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

of the most exact autobiography, becomes a 
symbol of all lives that have fallen, that 
have struggled to rise, that have failed in 
the endeavour. Towards the end the emo- 
tion rises in a crescendo, half of despair, half 
of hope, as he cries out in the very fury 
of helplessness against the worst of foes — 

"Vous tou jours, vil cri de haro. 
Qui me proclame et me diffame, 
Gueuse inepte, lache bourreau, 
Horrible, horrible, horrible femme! 

"Vous, rinsultant mensonge noir. 
La haine longue, I'affront ranee, 
Vous qui seriez le desespoir. 
Si la Foi n'etait I'Esperance. 

"Et TEsperance le pardon, 
Et ce pardon une vengeance. 
Mais quel voluptueux pardon. 
Quelle savoureuse vengeance!" 

Elsewhere he writes of his life in hospital 
— "last home perhaps, and best, the hos- 

213 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

pital" ; of his child- wife, for whose memory 
he has so strange a mixture of regretful 
complaint and unassuaged self-reproach; 
and always he returns to the burden of 
"Priez avec et pour le pauvre Lelianl'* 



214 



IV 

EPIGRAMMES 

In this little book of Epigratnmes, Ver- 
laine tells us he has tried to do something 
of what Goethe did in the Westoestlicher 
Divan, but "en sourdine, a ma maniere." 
And, indeed, there is a new note, as of a 
personality for once somewhat impersonal, 
concerned with general questions (always 
individually apprehended), with the inter- 
est of moral ideas, the charm of exterior 
things. The book was written in the calm 
retirement of that beautiful and fantastic 
hospital, Saint-Louis, which lies, like a little 
walled city of the middle ages, in the midst 
of the squalid and entertaining neighbour- 
hood of the Canal Saint-Martin. It was 
written in a time of unusual quiet, written 
quietly, without excitement, and from 
memory, as one might say, a memory for 
215 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



once of the head, not of the heart or the 
senses. In the introductory verses we find 
already the real, evasive Verlaine, calming 
down, as he fancies or fears, to a certain 
indifference. "Les extremes opinions" of 
the past are to be more or less abandoned; 
as for the wiles of woman, "on finit par 
s'habituer" ; the sharper clarion notes of the 
day — "le clairon fou de Taurore" — fade into 
a dim fluting under the fading sunset; one 
is simply tired, and not too unwilling for 
sleep. 

Quand nous irons, si je dois encor la voir, 
Dans Tobscurite du bois noir, 

Quand nous serons ivres d'air et de lumiere 
Au bord de la claire riviere, 

Quand nous serons d'un moment depayses 
De ce Paris aux coeurs brises, 

Et si la bonte lente de la nature 
Nous berce d'un reve qui dure, 

Alors, allons dormir du dernier sommeil? 
Dieu se chargera du reveil. 
2l6 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

This, then, is the note of the book; and 
in such a mood the memory of certain quaint 
or charming impressions comes up very 
happily. Japanese art, "lourd comme un 
crapaud, leger comme un oiseau" : the Ronde 
de Nuit, seen at Amsterdam; Cazals* latest 
portrait of himself, the spectral back view 
which serves as frontispiece to the book; 
the haunting sound of a barrel-organ — 

Bruit humain, fait de cris et de lentes souffrances 
Dans le soleil couchant au loin d'un long chemin — 

it is such sights and sounds as these that 
Verlaine evokes, in a series of delicately 
wrought little poems, more carefully written, 
for the most part, than much of his later 
verse. And there is one specially charming 
poem on the ballet: — 

Men age mur qui ne grommelle 
En somme qu'encore tres peu 
Aime le joli pele-mele 
D'un ballet turc ou camaieu. 
217 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



And the poem, if we mistake not, is a 
reminiscence of a certain memorable even- 
ing at the Alhambra, and it recalls, quaintly, 
deliciously, a certain quaint and delicious 
paradox which summed up a personal and 
poetical view of life and art : "yaime Shaks- 
peare," said Verlaine, "mais j*aime mieux 
le ballet!" 



2X8 



CONFESSIONS 

The Confessions of Verlaine — autobi- 
ographical notes from 1844, the year when 
he was born, to 1871, the year which proved 
the disastrous turning-point in his life — are 
quite unlike the confessions of any one else, 
and have a charm of their own as individual 
as the charm of his verse. They tell, in a 
vague and yet precise way, in a manner of 
extreme simplicity which suggests even 
more than it says, and by means of a 
series of little facts, little impressions — 
"nuances presque infinitesimales qui ont, a 
mes yeux, leur importance tres serieuse" — 
the story of "une vie beaucoup en nuances." 
And they tell all this in an easy, casual man- 
ner (as it would seem), mainly by means 
of an extraordinary visual memory. "Les 
yeux surtout chez moi furent precoces: je 
219 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



fixais tout, rien ne m'echappait de formes, 
de couleurs, d'ombres. Le jour me fas- 
cinait et bien que j'etais poltron dans Tob- 
scurite, la nuit m'attirait, une curiosite 
m'y poussait, j'y cherchais je ne sais quoi, 
du blanc, du gris, des nuances peut-etre." 
The book, despite the dehberate evasiveness 
of its method: "n'importe, sans plus m'ap- 
pesantir, tout simplement — en choisissant, 
elaguant, eludant? pas trop — m'y voici," is 
a subtle piece of psychology, the half-uncon- 
scious self-revelation of a man who has al- 
ways been the creature of violent and un- 
certain instinct, who has never possessed 
himself, but who has always been curious 
as to his own quaHties, not quite understand- 
ing them, and yet always so anxious to 
"confess." In this book, and not alone in 
the chapters relating to his childhood, he is 
always childlike in his frankness, his sim- 
plicity, and in the sincere, natural way in 
which he speaks of his follies and infirmities 

220 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

— "la manie, la fureur de boire," and the 
rest. 

And in all the later part of the book, the 
story of his falling in love, his marriage, 
with but a hint of that "espece d'enfer in- 
termittent," which married life too soon 
became, there is an ingenuous directness 
which has again all the charm of a child's 
narrative of things. This love story (hinted 
at in La Bonne Chanson, which he tells 
us has always remained the dearest to him 
of his books) is one of the prettiest idylls 
of young love ever written. It is like noth- 
ing else in its intense humanity and its 
virginal delicacy. Of the more disorderly 
side of a life which was even then far from 
reticent, we hear but little: that little ad- 
mirably precise, significant, and restrained. 
Nor does literature come very much into the 
scheme of these notes,, though such indica- 
tions as there are have a real biographical 
value, as, for instance, the story of how the 

221 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



literary instinct awoke, at the age of four- 
teen, with the surreptitious reading of 
Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mai, which the 
child was so far from understanding as to 
imagine even that the book "s'appelait tout 
bonnement : Les fleurs de Mai." 



222 



VI 

DEDICACES 

Verlaine*s latest book of poems is truly 
described on the title-page as nouvelle 
edition augmentee. In its first, privately 
printed, edition, it was scarcely more than 
a pamphlet. In its final shape it is much 
the largest book that Verlaine has ever pub- 
lished. It is not one of the best, nor, in- 
deed, could one expect it to be; for it is an 
informal bundle of friendly greetings, 
rather than a careful selection of verse, 
chosen for its own sake. In verse, much 
of which was written to order — at the order, 
that is, of a most friendly disposition — we 
are not likely to find the more poignant 
sentiment, or the more exquisite form, which 
we find in Sagesse, for instance, or in the 
Fetes galantes. On the contrary, it is only 
natural that one should come across many 
223 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

instances of that slovenliness of workman- 
ship which mars so much of Verlaine's later 
work, in its exaggeration of certain curious 
virtues of style which he was one of the first 
to discover. For instance, there is the en- 
jamhement, or running of one line into 
another, to which Verlaine has been so 
singularly successful in giving just that air 
of choice simplicity which is one of the sur- 
prises of his manner of writing. Here, only 
too often, the lines run into one another 
merely because they happen to come in that 
way, with rhymes at the end of a certain 
counted number of syllables. Then the son- 
nets — the book is for the most part written 
in this form — are constructed after every 
shape, possible and impossible, in alternate 
short and long lines, in short lines with a 
long line at the end, in infinite malforma- 
tions of rhyme-arrangement, and (I note 
with less regret) in that curious form, "la 
queue en Tair," which Huysmans compares 
224 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

to "certains poissons japonais en terre poly- 
chrome qui posent sur leur socle, les ouies 
en has." And, while few of the sonnets are 
without a touch of the familiar magic, there 
are not a few which have but one touch. 
Yet, after all our reservations are made, 
the book contains a large amount of really 
excellent work, and almost all of it is full 

An Invitation from Mallaem^ 
225 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



of personal interest, and, indeed, interest of 
various kinds. What a medley of names I 
find here among these Dedicaces: famous 
names, Coppee, Dierx, Mallarme, Huys- 
mans, Leon Cladel, by the side of anarchists 
after the order of Paterne Berrichon, ec- 
centrics like Bibi-Puree, the fag and butt 
of the Latin Quarter; then there is the 
"cabaretier miraculeux" of the Chat-Noir, 
Rodolphe Salis, and even the "Gerant du 
Miiller" ; there are some doctors, a sculptor, 
a musician, a painter; friends in London, 
with a charming little miniature of Fountain 
Court : — 

La Cour de la fontaine est, dans le Temple, 
Un coin exquis de ce coin delicat. 

And there are certain women, too, addressed 
under discreet initials, now with little homely 
details, as in the elegy on the death and 
funeral of "E's" goldfinch — 

Tu repris, et cela me parut aussi beau: 
"II aurait peut-etre mieux fait sur mon chapeau !" — 
226 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

or the even more charming poem on "Ph's" 
little dog that died in babyhood, "Ses pattes 
freles en I'air, comme les oiseaux"; now 
more intimately and more pathetically per- 
sonal, as in the verses, "Encore pour G.," 
with their desolate ending : 

Et je m'ennuie, — ainsi la pluie, 

Et je me pleure et je m'essuie 

Les yeux parce que je m'ennuie, 

Parce que je suis vieux et parce que je t'aime. 

And, again, there are two splendid and 
resonant sonnets to Arthur Rimbaud, 
touched with that exaltation which informs 
everything that Verlaine writes of his dead 
friend ; one of them, the first, being perhaps 
the finest poem in the book. In these son- 
nets the mainly familiar style is lifted, as it 
is also in the sonnet to Laurent Tailhade — 

Le pretre et sa chasuble enorme d'or jusques aux 
pieds — 

where the words assume a sort of hieratic 

splendour, as of the very vestments they 

227 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



describe. Somewhat the same note reap- 
pears in the sonnet to Villiers de I'lsle 
Adam, and again in the early sonnet to 
Charles Morice — Imperial, royal, sacer^ 
dotal — which is reprinted, with five others, 
from Amour. This note, however, com- 
paratively rare in Verlaine's work in general, 
is but seldom heard in these Dedicaces. 
More really characteristic is the vaguely and 
singularly pathetic sonnet on Fernand 
Langlois : — 

Haut comme le soleil, pale comme la lune, 
Comme dit vaguement le proverbe espagnol, 
II a presque la voix tendre du rossignol, 
Tant son coeur fut dement a ma triste fortune. 

And still more characteristic of the general 
tone of the volume is this brave, frank, open- 
air sonnet to Irenee Decroix: — 

Ou sont les nuits de grands chemins aux chants 
bacchiques 

Dans les Nords noirs et dans les verts Pas-de- 
Calais, 

228 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

Et les canaux periculeux vers les Belgiques 
Ou, gris, on chavirait en hurlant des couplets? 

Car on riait dans ces temps-la. — Tuiles et briques 
Poudroyaient par la plaine en hameaux assez laids ; 
Les fourbouyeres, leurs pipes et leurs bourriques 
Devalaient sur Arras, la ville aux toits follets 

Poignardant, espagnols, ces ciels epais de Flandre; 
Douai brandissait de son cote, pour s'en defendre. 
Son lourd beffroi carre, si leger cependant; 

Lille et sa biere et ses moulins a vent sans nombre 
Bruissaient. — Oui, qui nous rendra, cher ami, 

I'ombre 
Des bonnes nuits, et les beaux jours au rire ardent ? 

It is this simpler, more easily good- 
humoured way of taking life, without ask- 
ing too much or revolting too desperately, 
which is becoming Verlaine's final (dare one 
say final?) creed. Of a nature made up of 
so many irreconcilable elements, we get here 
mainly the less poignant side; not so much 
that 

Moi, I'ombre du marquis de Sade, et ce, parmi 
Parfois des airs naifs et faux de bon apotre, 
229 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

but the facile, childlike part of that simplicity 
which can be so terribly and inconveniently 
in earnest. Here, then, for the present — 
for with Verlaine we can count only on the 
actual moment as it passes, not on any 
memory of the moment that has gone before, 
or any probability as to the moment that is 
to come after — here is the conclusion of the 
whole matter: — 

Bah! nous aurons eu notre plasir 
Qui n'est pas celui de tout le monde 
Et le loisir de notre desir. 

Aussi benissons la paix profonde 
Qu'a defaut d'un tressor moins subtil 
Nous donnerent ces ainsi soit-il. 



230 



VII 

"INVECTIVES" 

I NEVER read a book with more regret 
than this book of Invectives, which has 
appeared since the death of Verlaine. I do 
not see why it should not have been written, 
if the writing of a petulance helped to clear 
that petulance away. But what might have 
been a sort of sad or vexed amusement to 
Verlaine, in some sleepless hour in hospital, 
should never have been taken for more than 
what it was, and should never, certainly, 
have gone further than one of the best- 
locked cupboards in Vanier's publishing 
office. I should like to think that Verlaine 
never intended it to go further; and I am 
quite sure that, in the first instance, he 
never did intend it to go further. But I 
know Vanier, and I know that whatever 
Vanier got hold of he was not likely to lose. 
231 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



Gradually the petulances would have heaped 
themselves one upon another, until they had 
come to about the size of a book. Then 
there would be the suggestion: why should 
we not make a book of them? Then jest 
would turn into earnest; Verlaine would be 
persuaded that he was a great satirist : it was 
so easy to persuade him of anything! And 
now here is the book. 

Well, the book has some admirable things 
in it, and, as perhaps the most admirable, 
I will quote a piece called Deception": 

"Satan de sort, Diable d'argent!" 

Parut le Diable 
Qui me dit: "L'homme intelligent 
Et raisonnable, 

"Que te void, que me veux-tu? 

Car tu m'evoques 
Et je crois, Thomme tout vertu, 
Que tu m'invoques. 

"Or je me mets, suis-je gentil? 
A ton service: 
Dis ton voeu naif ou subtil; 
Betise ou vice? 

232 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

"Que dois-je pour faire plaisir 
A ta sagesse? 
L'impuissance ou bien le desir 
Croissant sans cesse? 

"L'indifference ou bien Tabus? 
Parle, que puis-je?" 
Je repondis: "Tout vins sont bus, 
Plus de prestige, 

"La femme trompe et Thomme aussi, 
Je suis malade, 
JE VEUX MOURIR." LeDiable: "Si 
Cest la I'aubade. 

"Qu tu m'offres, je rentre. En Bas. 
Tuer m'offusque. 
Bon pour ton Dieu. Je ne suis pas 
A ce point brusque." 

Diable d'argent et par la mort! 

Partit le Diable, 
Me laissant en proie a ce sort 

Irremediable. 

In such a poem as this we have the Verlaine 
of the finer parts of Parallelement. But 
what of the little jokes for and against 
M. Moreas, the pointless attack on Leconte 
de Lisle, the unworthy rage against M. Rod, 

233 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



the political squibs, the complaints against 
doctors and magistrates, the condescension 
to the manner of M. Raoul Ponchon? 
Here is neither a devouring rage, which 
must flame itself out, nor a fine malice, 
justifying its existence, as the serpent does 
by the beauty of its coils. Verlaine's furies, 
which were frequent, were too brief, and 
too near the surface, to be of much use to 
him in the making of art. He was a big 
child, and his furies meant no more than 
the squalling and kicking of a baby. His 
nature was essentially good-humoured, find- 
ing pleasure on the smallest opportunity; 
often despondent, and for reasons enough, 
but for the most part, and in spite of every- 
thing — ill-health, poverty, interminable em- 
barrassments — full of a brave gaiety. He 
often grumbled, even then, with a sort of 
cheerfulness; and when he grumbled he 
used very colloquial language, some of which 
you will not find in the dictionaries of 
234 



NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE 

classical French. These poems are his 
grumblings; only, unfortunately, they are 
written down, and we can read them in 
print, critically, instead of listening to them 
in sympathetic amusement. And what in- 
justice they do him, alike as poet and man! 
How impossible it will be, now that this book 
has appeared, to convince anyone to whom 
Verlaine is but a name, that the writer of 
these Invectives was the most charming, 
the most lovable of men. The poet will re- 
cover from it, for, at all events, there are 
the Fetes Galantes, the Romances sans 
Paroles, Sag esse. Amour, and the others, 
which one need but turn to, and which are 
there for all eyes. But the man ! 

Well, the man will soon become a legend, 
and this book will, no doubt, be one of the 
many contradictory chapters of the legend. 
In a few years* time Verlaine will have be- 
come as distant, as dubious, as distorted, as 
Gilles de Retz. He will once more re-enter 
235 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



that shadow of unknown horror from which 
he has but latterly emerged. People will 
refuse to believe that he was not always 
drunk, or singing "Chansons pour elle." 
They will see in his sincere Catholicism only 
what des Esseintes, in the book of Huys- 
mans, saw in it: "Des reveries clandestines, 
des fictions d'un amour occulte pour une 
Madone byzantine qui se muait, a un certain 
moment, en une Cydalise egaree dans notre 
siecle." And they will see, perhaps, only a 
poetical licence in such lines as these, in 
which, years ago, Verlaine said all that need 
ever be said in excuse, or in explanation of 
the problem of himself: 

Un mot encore, car je vous doit 
Quelque lueur en definitive 
Concernant la chose qui m'arrive: 
Je compte parmi les maladroits. 

J'ai perdu ma vie et je sais bien 

Que tout blame sur moi s'en va fondre: 

A cela je ne puis que repondre 

Que je suis vraiment ne Saturnien. 



A PRINCE OF COURT 
PAINTERS 



A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS 

All Watteau is in that Imaginary 
Portrait which Walter Pater wrote in the 
form of extracts from the diary of Wat- 
teau's neighbour and friend at Valenciennes, 
the daughter of Antoine Pater, "maitre 
sculpteur," and the sister of Jean Baptiste 
Pater, Watteau's only pupil. The family 
of Walter Pater came from that part of 
Flanders, and was, indeed, closely connected 
with the family of the painter, and in writ- 
ing these extracts from the diary it amused 
him to reconstruct what might well have 
been some of his family papers. For the 
facts of Watteau's life he went to the care- 
fully documented essay of the Goncourts, 
and especially to the contemporary narrative 
which they printed from a MS. In the new 
life of Watteau, by M. Virgile Josz, we 
have for the first time a quite trustworthy 
239 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

biography, in which some new facts are 
estabhshed and some slight but important 
corrections made. How well M. Josz knows 
the life and art of the i8th century his 
previous study of Fragonard has already 
shown. His new book has the charm of a 
brilliant historical novel, and it is everywhere 
founded upon precise documents. He has 
the art of weaving a narrative full of colour, 
full of picturesque detail, in which careful 
research and subtle criticism become part of 
an unfatiguing entertainment. No really 
serious critic and historian of art at the 
present day has so light a touch, so easy a 
mastery over his material. And, after read- 
ing this minute, learned, and sympathetic 
study of le plus grand, le plus mysterieux, 
le plus troublant genie du xviii^ siecle, one 
still finds, on turning to Pater's Prince of 
Court Painters, that all Watteau is there, 
divined, analysed, praised faultlessly, in that 
hardly imaginary portrait. 
240 



A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS 

Watteau went through life like one al- 
ways in hiding, sick, restless, distrustful; 
unsatisfied with himself and with his work; 
never really at home in the world. His 
malady drove him from place to place, in an 
unsuccessful search after tranquil obscurity, 
in the incessantly renewed hope of some 
new place in which he could be perfectly 
well, not distracted by friends or by cares, 
alone with his work. From his youth he 
was weary of most pleasures, most desires; 
always a critic, and most of that which he 
cared most to render. It was his delight 
and his labour to look on at a life which 
was not his, and in which he did not desire 
to mingle. He is himself that melancholy 
spectator of pleasures in which he does not 
share, whom he has placed in the corner of 
so many of his pictures; or V Indifferent, 
poised for the dance to which he brings an 
aged smile and a joyless knowledge of the 
steps of the measure. He creates the most 
241 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



exquisite woman in modern painting, and 
goes through life with a careful withdrawal 
from too close a contact with women. The 
painter of fetes galantes, he is never the 
dupe of those sentimental reveries in which 
there is no frank abandonment of the flesh 
or spirit. His brush has both coquetry and 
raillery, and no wit in paint was ever so 
discreet in its comments on life. 

Watteau is the only painter of la ga- 
lanterie who has given seriousness to the 
elegance of that passing moment, who has 
fixed that moment in an attitude which 
becomes eternal. And he has done so 
alike by his intellectual conception of 
life, of the human comedy, and by the 
distinction, the distinguished skill of his 
technique. For a similar gravity in the 
treatment of "light" subjects, and for a 
similar skill in giving them beauty and dis- 
tinction, we must come down to Degas. For 
Degas the ballet and the cafe replace the 
242 



A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS 

Italian comedy of masks and the afternoon 
conversation in a park. But in Degas there 
is the same instantaneous notation of move- 
ment and the same choice and strange richness 
of colour; with a quite comparable fondness 
for seizing what is true in artificial life, and 
what is sad and serious in humanity at play. 
But Watteau, unlike Degas, is never cruel. 
He has almost an envy of these elegant 
creatures, and of their capacity for taking 
no thought for the morrow; he, as he gives 
them immortality, thinks sadly of the tempo- 
rary joys. He listens to the same music, 
sees their hands and lips join, and is himself 
never ready for that Embarquement pour 
Cythere towards which he sees them mov- 
ing. It is with disillusioned, not with mock- 
ing, eyes that he looks upon those to whom 
the world is still unspoilt. Happy are those, 
he seems to say, who can be happy. 

Watteau was a great lover of music, and 
he has placed instruments of music even in 

243 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



hands that do not know how to hold bow 
and handle. Like music, his painting is a 
sad gaiety, and I rarely look at his pictures 
without receiving almost a musical sensa- 
tion. It is a music of lute and clavichord, 
in which the strings sob and the quills rustle, 
and sometimes one may say, as Browning 
says of Galluppi: "In you come with your 
cold music till I creep through every 
nerve." 

There is a certain chill in this music of 
the pictures which could never, unlike the 
music itself, have sounded merry when 
Gilles and Finette were alive. The colour of 
Watteau is always the colour of bright 
things faded, of rose-petals in the old age 
of roses. There is melancholy in the sub- 
dued grace of his lines, full of active languor. 
And in his women, themselves like a deli- 
cate music, there is something almost dis- 
quieting, some of the mystery of music. 

For Watteau a woman is the most beauti- 
244 



A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS 

ful thing in the world; something of a toy, 
perhaps, or an ornament, flowers or jewels; 
and her clothes must be as beautiful as her- 
self. He paints what no one else has 
painted: a frisson made woman. But he 
paints without desire, with a kind of tender, 
melancholy respect for the soul of the flesh, 
embodied in fine silks, fragile, loving to be 
loved. For him she is a bibelot, not a 
mistress, and he has made her after his own 
heart. He paints her cheek and her face 
with the same tenderness, the same passion- 
ate ecstasy. And he has put into her eyes 
not only that dainty malice with which she 
fights and conquers, but also that dainty 
mystery with which she attracts and retains. 
The woman of Watteau is woman clothed 
and civilised, and in the best society. Born 
a mason's son, he had, all his life, an in- 
structive aversion for la has peuple; the 
people through whom one must elbow one's 
way. And his women, if they are not in 
245 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

,_ _ * 

f 

\ 

fancy dress, and playing romantic parts, are 
always women who have the leisure to be 
beautiful, to play at life. The Frenchwoman 
begins to exist in his pictures, and he has 
fixed a type, which remains what most 
Frenchwomen would wish to be. These 
piquant, enigmatical creatures have supreme 
worldly elegance. The suspicion of thought 
which he has hinted at in their swift eyes 
is a reticence which would promise and re- 
main free. They have the mystery which 
a woman has for a man, because he is a 
man and she a woman. 

With Watteau Flemish painting ends and 
French painting begins. He was a devout 
student of Rubens, and learnt from him 
various secrets, a different but not lesser 
life of the flesh, a mere tempered but not 
less splendid life of the clothes. He adds 
as much in elegance as he omits in ampli- 
tude; he creates a new thing, which is 
French. And may it not be said, with 
246 



A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS 

M. Josz, that he does more than anyone has 
yet done towards the creation of English 
painting? In that year which he spent in 
London, just before his death, his work had 
an immediate and an immense success. 
When Frederick the Great, twenty years 
after his death, wanted to buy some of his 
pictures, his intendant answered : "Tous les 
ouvrages que Watteau a fait sont presque 
tous en Angleterre, ou on en fait un cas 
infini." Holbein, Rubens, Vandyke, had been 
in England, had painted there, been ad- 
mired; but it is only after the visit of Wat- 
teau and the sight of this delicacy, finesse, 
this clear and vaporous colour, this arrest- 
ing of fine shades, this evocation of a new, 
sensitive, modern beauty, that the English 
begin to paint; and are there not in the 
work of Watteau qualities which anticipate 
Reynolds and Gainsborough, as there are 
qualities which anticipate both Constable 
and Turner? 
1903. 

'247 



ODILON REDON 



ODILON REDON 

The name of Odilon Redon is known to 
but few people in France, and to still fewer 
people in England. Artistic Paris has never 
had time to think of the artist who lives so 
quietly in her midst, working patiently at 
the record of his visions, by no means dis- 
couraged by lack of appreciation, but prob- 
ably tired of expecting it. Here and there 
the finer and more alert instinct of some 



aC^ 




A Typical Signature of Odilon Redon 
251 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



man who has himself brought new gifts to 
his art — Huysmans, Mallarme, Charles 
Morice, Emile Hennequin — ^has divined 
what there is of vision and creation in this 
strange, grotesque world which surges only- 
half out of chaos — the world of an artist 
who has seen day and night. 

The work of Odilon Redon — ^his later 
work, that which is most characteristic of 
him — consists of a series of lithographic 
albums, all published since 1880; Dans le 
Reve, A Edgard Poe, Les Origines, Horn- 
mage a Goya, La Tentation de Saint An- 
toine, A Gustave Flaubert, Pieces Modernes, 
and Les Fleurs de Mai. Each album con- 
tains from six to ten plates in large folio, 
printed on beau papier de Chine, without 
text, often without title, or with a vague 
and tantalising legend, such as Au reveil, 
j'aperqus la Deesse de V Intelligible, au profil 
severe et dur. So, without an attempt to 
conciliate the average intelligence, without 
252 



ODILON REDON 



a word of explanation, without a sign of 
apology for troubling the brains of his 
countrymen, Odilon Redon has sent out al- 
bum after album. So little effect have they 
produced that it has taken ten years to sell 
twenty-four out of the twenty-five copies 
of Dans le Reve. "Reste Texemplaire." 

Odilon Redon is a creator of nightmares. 
His sense for pure beauty is but slight, or 
rather for normal beauty; for he begets 
upon horror and mystery a new and strange 
kind of beauty, which astonishes, which ter- 
rifies, but which is yet, in his finest work, 
beauty all the same. Often the work is not 
beautiful at all: it can be hideous, never 
ineffective. He is a genuine visionary: he 
paints what he sees, and he sees through a 
window which looks out upon a night with- 
out stars. His imagination voyages in 
worlds not realised, voyages scarcely con- 
scious of its direction. He sees chaos, which 
peoples its gulfs before him. The abyss 

253 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 

swarms — toutes sortes d'effroyable betes 
surgissent — animal and vegetable life, the 
germs of things, a creation of the uncreated. 
The world and men become spectral under 
his gaze, become transformed into symbols, 
into apparitions, for which he can give no 
account often enough. C'est une apparition 
— voila tout! He paints the soul and its 
dreams, especially its bad dreams. He has 
dedicated some of his albums to Flaubert, 
to Poe, to Baudelaire; but their work is to 
him scarcely so much as a starting-point. 
His imagination seizes on a word, a chance 
phrase, and transforms it into a picture 
which goes far beyond and away from the 
author's intention — as in the design which 
has for legend the casual words of Poe: 
"L'oeil, comme un ballon bizarre, se dirige 
vers rinfini." We see an actual eye and an 
actual balloon: the thing is grotesque. 

The sensation produced by the work of 
Odilon Redon is, above all, a sensation of 
2S4 




Sketch of Odilon Redon 



ODILON REDON 



infinitude, of a world beyond the visible. 
Every picture is a little corner of space, 
where no eye has ever pierced. Vision suc- 
ceeds vision, dizzily. A cunning arrangement 
of lines gives one the sense of something 
without beginning or end: spiral coils, or 
floating tresses, which seem to reach out, 
winding or unwinding for ever. And as all 
this has to be done by black and white, 
Redon has come to express more by mere 
shadow than one could have conceived pos- 
sible. One gazes into a mass of blackness, 
out of which something gradually disen- 
gages itself, with the slowness of a night- 
mare pressing closer and closer. And, with 
all that, a charm, a sentiment of grace, 
which twines roses in the hair of the vision 
of Death. The design. La Mort, is cer- 
tainly his masterpiece. The background is 
dark; the huge coils which terminate the 
body are darker than the background, and 
plunge heavily into space, doubling hugely 
255 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



upon themselves, coils of living smoke: yet 
the effect of the picture is one of light — a 
terror which becomes beautiful as it passes 
into irony. The death's head, the little 
vague poverty-stricken face, is white, faint, 
glimmering under the tendrils of hair and 
roses: tresses of windy roses which stream 
along and away with an effect of surprising 
charm, the lines running out in delicate 
curves, to be lost in the night. And below, 
separated from the head by a blotch of 
sheer blackness, one sees a body, a beautiful, 
slender, supple body, glittering with a 
strange acute whiteness, with a delicate arm 
raised to the empty temples of the skull. 
Below, in its frightful continuation of the 
fine morbid flesh of the body, the black 
column, the huge and heavy coils, which 
seem endless. The legend is from Flaubert. 
Death speaks, saying: Mon ironic depasse 
toutes les aufres. 
Ammonaria and Le Spinx et la Chimere 
256 



ODILON REDON 



are from the same album, which illustrates 
Le Tentation de Saint Antoine, and are 
characteristic, though not the finest, ex- 
amples of Redon's work. The scene of 
Ammonaria is before the temple of Serapis, 
at Alexandria. It is a Christian martyr 
whom they are scourging : she writhes under 
the blows, in the cruel sunlight: one feels 
the anguish of the bent and tortured figure, 
suffering visibly. The other design renders 
that marvellous dialogue between the Sphinx 
and the Chimera. "C'est que je garde mon 
secret!" says the Sphinx. "J^ songe et je 
calcule. . . . Et mon regarde que rien ne 
pent devier, demeure tendu a travers les 
choses sur un horizon inaccessible. Moi," 
replies the Chimera, "je suis legere et joy- 
euse!" and it is a veritable hilarity that one 
discovers, looking at it rightly, in the regard 
of the strange creature: a spasm of ironic 
laughter in the blots of blackness which are 
its eyes, in the mouth that one divines, in 
257 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



the curl and coil of the whole figure. In the 
calm gaze and heavy placid pose of the 
Sphinx, lines of immeasurable age above 
its eyes, there is a crushing force which 
weighs on one like a great weight, something 
external. The power of the Chimera is of 
the mind and over souls. Vague, terrible, 
a mockery, a menace, it has the vertigo of 
the gulf in its eyes, and it draws men to- 
ward those "new perfumes, those larger 
flowers, those unfelt pleasures," which are 
not to be found in the world. In another 
design the Chimera, spitting fire from its 
nostrils, light glittering and leaping on 
wings and tail, turns on itself, distending its 
jaws in a vast ironic bark: la chimere aux 
verts, tournoie, aboie. More terrible, more 
wonderful, more disquieting is Le Viable 
avec les sept Peches cardinaux sous ses 
'Ailes. The design is black upon black, and 
it is only slowly that a huge and solemn, 
almost a maternal face, looms out upon one : 
Satan, placid, monstrous, and winged, who 
258 



ODILON REDON 



cradles softly the little vague huddled fig- 
ures of the seven deadly sins, holding them 
in his large hands, under the shadow of his 
wings. And there is another Satan, val- 
iantly insurgent against the light that strikes 
him, a figure of superb power in revolt. 
Yet another design shows us Pegasus, his 
beautiful wing broken, a wing that had felt 
the high skies, falling horribly upon the 
rocks: all the agony and resistance of the 
splendid creature seen in the trampling 
hoofs and heaving sides, and the head caught 
back by the fall. Again one sees a delicate 
twilight landscape of trees and birds, a bit 
of lovely nature, and in it, with the trouble 
of a vague nightmare, coming there inex- 
plicably, Le Joueur, a man who holds on his 
shoulders an immense cube painfully: the 
man and the trees seem surprised to see 
each other. There is another landscape, a 
primeval forest, vague and disquieting, and 
a solitary figure, the figure of a man who is 
half a tree, like some forgotten deity of a 
259 



COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 



lost race : the forest and the man are at one, 
and hold converse. And there are heads, 
heads floating in space, growing on stalks, 
couched on pedestals ; eyeballs, which voyage 
phantasmally across the night, which emerge 
out of nests of fungus, which appear, haloed 
in light, in the space of sky between huge 
pillars ; there are spectral negroes, there are 
centaurs, there are gnomes, a Cyclops (with 
the right accent of terrifying and yet comic 
reality), embryonic formless little shapes, 
and, persuasively, the Sciapodes of Flaubert : 
"La tete le plus bas possible, c'est le secret 
du bonheur! II y doit avoir quelque part," 
says Flaubert, "des figures primordiales, 
dont les corps ne sont que les images," and 
Redon has drawn them, done the impossible. 
The Chimera glides mystically through the 
whole series. Death, the irony; Life, the 
dream ; Satan, the visible prince of darkness, 
pass and repass in the eternal dance of 
apparitions. 
1903. 

260 



WORKS OF 

W. H. HUDSON 

THE PUEPLE LAND 

INTRODUCED BY 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

James M. Barrie says: "It is one of the choicest things of 
our latter day literature." 

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larged, by going there. A very great writer, and — to my 
thinking — the most valuable our Age possesses." Net, $1.50 

A SHEPHERD'S LIFE 

In "A Shepherd's Life" Hudson takes us into a quaint 
old-fashioned world, that of the shepherds of the bleak South 
Downs of England, where in sheltered folds of the naked 
plains nestle placid little old-world villages, shaded by im- 
memorial trees and surrounded by quiet, forgotten streams. 

Net, iS.OO 

A CRYSTAL AGE 

WITH A CRITICAL APPRECIATION BT 

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The N. Y. Evening Post says, "It has the zeal of the open 
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IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA 

The late Prof. William James, of Harvard, gives high 
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man who can write." Net, $1.50 

NATURALIST IN LA PLATA 

New Edition in Press 

ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 

New Edition in Press 



(She 
Hill-Towns of France 

BY 

EUGENIE M. FRYER 



Illustrated with ^o pen-and-ink drawings by 
Roy L. Hilton and over 25 fine photo-engravings. 

Not a guide-book in the technical sense, and 
not a history; but a charming series of descrip- 
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storied, romantic and beautiful places in 
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This superbly illustrated volume deals with 
the following: 

PoiTOu: Poitiers, Chauvigny b" Uzerche. 
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Quercy: Cahors 6° Rocamadour. 
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Provence: Aries, Montmajour 6° Les Baux. 
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AuvERGNE : Le Puy. 
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La Beauce: Chartres. 
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Net $2 . 50 

E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY 
681 Fifth Avenue New York City 



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